Writing always felt different for me. From that very first time I discovered it, entirely on accident no less. A poetry project for 7th grade English. My classmates would ask me to help with their pieces, how did you write that? How did you know how to say that? How do you choose the words? I had no answers for them. I was not choosing or knowing. I used to say that the pencil moved me, some invisible lips whispered in my ear and I couldn’t ignore it. The words were just there, floating in the space between the desks, in the pause between each pencil scratch, lingering with the dust motes under fluorescent lights, and I only had to let them flow into me. I think, most people, at best, use language as a tool, a weapon, a device. An instrument to meet their needs. I think, at worst, most people are so deaf and blind to the precise meanings, the beauty of a well put together sentence, the intricacies behind one word over another. Everything that lies in wait under the surface of that font. It always bothered me, that writing, that language and words, were so easily counterfeit. It was the only kind of blasphemy I knew. Writing, to me, was a force of nature, an energy, an element, unseen but wielding unmistakable effect, like gravity, woven into the fabric of existence with us. You can’t see it, and most people go their whole lives without realizing it’s really there, let alone how it works, but once upon a time an apple fell on Isaac Newton’s head and nothing was the same after that. And at 13, I could lose myself in the orbit of that great celestial body, I happily let it carry my body across the universe, into the stars. But then you’re not 13 anymore, and even though you promised it wouldn’t, somehow life takes hold. That unheard song, that unseen power, it faded further and further away without me, the more I neglected it, got too busy, put it aside for necessary things. I always thought the stories would leave me one day. That, finally, one day I wouldn’t feel that pull, that ache, in my soul, in the deepest center of my chest, when the story was over. I thought one day I wouldn’t be inhabited by them anymore, if one day I grew to love my life enough, love myself enough. And I do love my life now, and I do love myself the best way I know how, but still, I pick up that book, I watch that movie, I listen to that story, and I’m gone. Each time it’s over, it’s like re-entering Earth’s atmosphere. It’s bittersweet, the love, the longing. I imagine it’s how an astronaut would feel looking at Earth from so far above, captivating and beautiful and terrifyingly alone. You love the view, you love the way it feels, but in a weird way it always makes you miss home, and yet yearn for it once more as soon as your feet touch the ground. I never imagined the stories would keep finding me, across all this time and space.
