angel do you know?

I don’t know what to write.

And yet everytime i click my pen, words just flow out the way hot trembling tea pours out of a kettle. Words so full of meaning, full of nostalgia and smoke, that sometimes I don’t even understand where they come from. It’s like my soul is taking a backseat and just watching my mind and body work. I feel a sense of detachment, to the work that I’m creating, the words that I’m writing on the paper, and the world around me in general.

At first, this was a phenomenon to me that wasn’t that acceptable. I wanted to be a conscious writer, someone who is compos mentis in their creations and concerned with the most minute details because that makes them equally ethereal as the writing they’re producing. When they tie their piece together with a centric metaphor that was carefully chosen from the start, or when they construct a pretty phrase that is completely original, I get so awestruck and so inspired and so invested. And that is every writer’s dream, to have someone invested in their stories, their ideas, and their visions. I wanted to be that kind of writer too. But I wasn’t, and I knew it. My choices weren’t conscious in the least, I wrote where my mind and my hand told me to go, and from there tied the piece together like a parcel with loose strings. It was clumsy, so clumsy that some days I decided this parcel is unacceptable to gift to other people. And that some days became most days, became all days when I altogether stopped writing for this space.

With this came cursory moments of regret. They were easy enough to wave off with excuses that I’m too busy, I have no energy, I’m no good at writing, I’m too tired to create collages. The truth is that I was scared, and I knew it. Writing had been a source of pride since young and there was no way I could stand to see my deterioration as I grew older and supposedly better in all fields, except this one. So I put it in the back of my mind, writing only when I was emotional, when the words were threatening to burst out of me because that was when I would not care about the quality of it. I wrote letters and essays and journal entries, everything but the type of writing that would truly show my prowess, or the lack of it. Maybe the time was over. Maybe my little writing flower had already bloomed and it was time for it to die. I told myself that everytime I thought of this blog, and then the pressure of maintaining it, and then my questionable skill.

I guessed I could have carried out with life. I did, in a way. I got busier with my studies, spent more time with friends, went to new places and met new people and made new memories. But sometimes, when I ride on the bus right next to the window, my head wanders and I think about writing things. About the people I just met, how someone I knew could be flirtatious in one moment but oblivious the next. About fragile and redolent flowers and how some of them feel like paper while others feel like pure velvet. About stars, how people worship them while they are smaller than we are, but they made it big. About the sun and how it sinks into the sea but rises every morning to kiss the sky. I thought, and thought, and thought about things, and then a ding dong would send me out of the train of thought and on my way and I’ll think, I’ll write it another day. And as you know, I never did.

Then I came across this concept in a class that wasn’t remotely relevant to writing, but it applied all the same. It contrasted a person’s competency against their performance, and the general idea is that people’s performance tend fall short of their actual competency, due to several factors such as the conditions they are performing in, their ability to apply theoretical knowledge, language barriers, and a multitude of other reasons. And all of a sudden, I realise, it’s me. The person directing the writing in my mind is me, and the person translating the writing on the paper is me, and the person watching is also me. And there was no reason to feel like an impostor in my own body when my competency was in play, and part of me was conscious of the lexical or stylistic or structural choices that went into my writing. The parcel that I created may not be the best looking, but it was nevertheless created with my best effort at that time and the people who appreciate the sentiment will like it enough. And being scared of not being able to compare up with other people was a futile fear in the least, because a person who has tied parcel for 2 days is rarely likely to tie them better than a person who has tied them for 20 years. I was and am a young writer, and to give up at this point would be a sunk cost that continues sinking everytime I get on a bus.

I visited my blog as a viewer for the first time, and I read through my past entries. There were definitely some where i thought ‘why did I publish this’ 😶 , but there were times where I looked at a phrase and thought, ‘that’s pretty’. Perhaps some of you have heard me talk about other people’s writings before, but the way some people write is literal beauty to me. Nothing makes me happier as a reader than a perfectly phrased expression that gives me exactly the feeling that I want, and I found myself feeling that, from my writing.

Now this is starting to sound a little narcissistic. My point is that this could be you too. Often we think we are not all that good at something and abandon it, only to find out later that we were on the path to becoming greater. By then, it might be impossible to salvage a tragic waste of potential, much like Faustus, but our sin would be underreaching instead.

But I hope that all of you reach into the back of your mind, pluck out that parcel (or parcels) you have thrown down there, and try again. You never know what may come out of it, and if not? That’s a little bit of nostalgia for you.