10. Kelsey Ipsen // felimnn
When I first saw Writing Spaces I began wondering what my own space was. I didn't think I had one anymore. I used to have an old school desk, the wooden one where you can open the lid and store things inside. We had them at my country school when I was six, my friends and I used to catch those white cabbage moths between cupped hands and keep them inside. Every time we opened our desk lids, the flutter of wings. I remember, then, a teacher asking us to write down what we thought the Bermuda Triangle was, and I began writing an entire chapter book about a curious blue triangle that children would pick up and disappear into different worlds. I remember being upset because the rest of the class had written a sentence and the teacher had told everyone what the Bermuda Triangle really was and we all had to move on before I had even scribbled down two pages of my epic novel. I wanted to create my own worlds. I had read about so many in books I'd taken in piles underneath the flower bushes below my first bedroom window.
When I got my very own desk in my room I immediately began to gather trinkets, glass cases, old satin flower pictures in golden frames, animal masks, genie lamps, a typewriter. Inside the desk I kept my pages of writing folded up like butterfly wings. I rearranged my treasures all the time, trying to create even a part of my inside world that I could touch and see on the outside. I had stopped beginning my epic novels about Bermuda Triangles, dolphins and cakes, I had stopped scribbling my teenage poetry and fantasy stories and had begun writing secret prose about a boy across the ocean who I couldn't be with. I'd always been secretive about my writing, a world I felt I couldn't explain properly yet so I needed to keep it to myself and allow it to grow. When I got my Macbook,it was the perfect match; the hidden paper butterflies could always fly away but with my Macbook they were safe and shut in.
I started publishing things on my Tumblr page. I wanted to be braver. I wanted to be brave enough to share my own world and brave enough to be the girl I was when I wrote. I collected my words and treasures around me to remind myself. I wanted to be Matilda from The Ghost's Child and sail away across the oceans to find my bird. And I did, in a way. I began to feel suffocated by everything, like maybe I'd keep writing and piling up things until I'd never actually do. So I left all my treasures behind and the desk all empty of papery moths and moved to France. Now I'm with my bird and my books and I guess it's just these things, the bare yet favorite essentials, that have become my writing space. It's made me lighter, freer. I can feel it in how and why I write these days. With so much distance between myself and my former real world, I've been turning my old haunts into only words and finding ways to be my own world without the tricks and trinkets to surround it. Here I am now, and here I can finally be.