Sometimes when we meet people, we know within the first moments that someday they are going to break our hearts.
When you find yourself in this moment, the choice is yours to make of it what you will.
I've been writing a lot of really great pieces this month, and I owe pretty much all of it to these weekly writing sessions with Nat and Rae.
I've written pieces about sisterly betrayal, humorous post-death "second-world problems", books that changed my life, a woman who worshiped her own self-hatred, a man caught in the middle of practicing a cult sacrifice, a woman who is uncontrollably drawn to desiring a man whom she initially finds overwhelmingly repulsive, and poems built from uncomfortable and awkward phrase exercises.
I find myself building ludicrous and inescapable plot elements.
I want to write monologues about a doctor convicted of homicidal malpractice.
About how it really feels to be stuck in the frightening crime syndicate that is the Russian Mafia, as a hopeless and helpless mobwife.
I want to write a drama scene about a man with early onset multiple personality disorder- where one actor portrays the man, and the other portrays his alter- and they must play two different sides of the same brain.
I want to write about Heathcliff and Catherine. I want to be able to capture how I feel when I hear words quoted from Peter Pan. I want to write step by step directions on how to make me fall in love with you the way I've fallen in love with Holden Caulfield.
I want to explain what it means to me to listen to Drown-Smashing Pumpkins on repeat.
Mostly I just want you to read the words I have written. That's all I really want.
I want to know what you think. What my writing brings out in your mind, in your soul.
Oh, but I am afraid.
The distance is long and the years are longer, still.
I want to give up, and run on to the next one, flighty whippoorwill, without looking back, but I am not allowed. I am uninvited there.
Here is where I must stay. Here is where I'm told things are waiting for me.
The back and forth is beginning to grow tiresome- but the writing, oh, the writing. I have never been this liberated by my words.
Creatively, I have blossomed. I have felt the depth of inspiration this month, and to tell the honest
truth about it, I think I like who I'm becoming as a writer. Finally.
I don't feel confused, or guilty, or ashamed of my writing anymore. I don't feel conflicted about it the way I used to. I don't tell myself that my words try too hard, or that my words are a mindless imitation and shadow of the styles used by the great writers I have studied. I feel that they are real, and that they are my own.
Honestly, I don't question why tragedy moves me so heavily anymore.
I've always been drawn to sad and dark things and for the first time in my life I'm not questioning why.
It's like this past month, through the words that I have crafted together, I've realized that tragedy, and the way I view it, is a gift. A gift uniquely and passionately crafted for me, to me.
I found this quote the other day:
"Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this, too, was a gift."
I thought about myself. I thought about how I write. I thought about what I dream of writing about.
And then the clouds parted a little bit, and something shifted within me.
And not to mention, I realized exactly why it is that I should never be allowed to write children's books.
Sarcasm aside.
In those moments where you know your heart is about to be broken by this perfect stranger, you have the same choice that you have when you are confronted with the realization that what you are about to write has the potential to break you or break someone else.
The possibility is humbling enough.
The choice is yours.
You can go, or you can stay.
You can do, or you can do not.
There is no try. There is no escape clause.
No matter what happens, I promise myself to write it down.
Whether it is for the purposes of being read by others, or only by myself, does not matter. What matters is that those words, the ones floating like souls in the river Styx outside the realm of my conscious thought, are picked up by me- and that I breathe life into them once again.
This is what I have been given, this is who I am.
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