I’ve been writing for as long as I can remember.
When I was a child, long before I understood how I could use a pen and paper as my weapons to protect myself against the world, I wrote in the walls of our home. A sneer across my face, crayons between my guilty palms, and the word “happy” illegibly scribbled across our freshly painted wall. I found myself hiding beside dust bunnies and in between hidden crevices as my grandmother screamed in disappointment and anger. She already knew who had done such a heinous crime, she was just waiting for the confession of the criminal who will be punished with an earful of vulgar language and a hard pinch in the thigh.
Through the years in elementary school, I wrote poems in the wooden surfaces of our classroom desks. Call it vandalism, but my misdemeanours don’t just end there because at every visit to the washroom, I would scrawl words across the doors of the stalls; telling strangers my stories under a pseudonymous name.
And then one Christmas morning, I unwrapped a red hardcover notebook from my mother. Words came in fleets; pouring themselves into the pages, choking against each other between the two thin lines that separated each sentence I wrote. I started learning how to map the universe through language, build castles with my words, and fold oceans into my pockets.
Writing is my way to understand whatever it is I cannot fathom, and I could only thank God for the words.