(Poetic expression)

• • • • •

I have been told that a good writer is someone who has a story written deep inside them, and they cannot live without telling it, and that it is frantic to be released and shared.

But I do not have that. I do not have any grandiose compulsions to reveal some hidden tale inside of me, there is nothing aching to be let out, no direct story that my heart follows in every spare moment.

I write in desperation, yes, but not in the way you think. I write as if I am chasing the words down, I write as if pouring them onto a page and calling it a chapter is the only way to capture what fleeting fills my thoughts. I write with broad and sweeping words in hopes of conveying the strokes of colors and images that crowd my head. I cling to every speck of imagination and cry as it slips through my fingers, but from each tear another idea blooms, and all that is left is to pick up the pieces, and, dutifully, continue in this terrible work of lacking.

I lack the completion, the motivation, the dedication, to continue in any of my many projects. I struggle through the work of words because nothing can make me feel quite the same way as writing does, but in the end the difference I make is irrelevant. I have no finished pieces, I have only pieces. And it is up to me to put together a puzzle which was never whole in the first place, and convince others to call it art.

Every day a new scrap of thought is added, one that needs its own separate picture painted out, so that I am surrounded by half-assembled images that bleed out at the edges, for lack of refinement.

I am so tired of the struggle, of the fighting just for any thought that may build into something beautiful, and yet still, I write.

Yet still I write.

• • • • •
As far back as I can remember, all I have ever wanted was to write.

Not that I was any good at telling stories. My first creations were rushed, stilted things, ideas that grew too grand for the patience I had on hand, so they were either discarded, or abruptly finished halfway through. I had no endings, everything was a cliffhanger or left open to be explored, as if my younger self was promising that I would never leave these stories, that for each character and world I would come back for them one day.

I never did. There are too many ideas in the mind of a ten year old, after all. It didn't get any better as I grew, either. Any passing thought could be subject to capture, be tied up and poured into half-made molds that spill into half-made ideas. Whole flocks of them could come by at any moment; I never get all of them. A name, a plot point, a particularly tearful moment, the flash of a scene and the vague sense of a story, before it is gone, and I am rushing to cobble together that which I know, that which I have found, and that which still eludes me.

But still, they are never finished.

I have pages upon pages, books upon books of still unsaid things, of words waiting to be used, if only I knew how. There is a library of titles to empty books, of first chapters and seventh chapters and tired, aching epilogs. But what use is prose with little plot? What life is there to a character if they do not grow, if they do not change, if they simply are until they are not? What use does a character have until they are laying on the page, ink spilling as blood from words I have written many a time before, my pen as my sword, my word as my weapon? They are practiced in the tears and sorrow of death, of emotions spilled out on a page, but what do they display in their life?

My words are not as skilled in the matters of living, of the overcoming of obstacles, of the winning of battles. I am not made for conflict, nor am I made to write it. I do not have stories, nor problems, except that which I carry on my own, yet I am the holder of every soft moment, of hands tucked one into another, of murmured words and lowered eyes and the peace that comes in the seconds before, the moments after.

I cannot write stories, yet scenes crowd my head, short slices of a much larger conflict that lie just beyond my reach, a vision I can see, yet dimly. I see photographs and clips, and dutifully I transcribe them into words and sigh, for the vastness of all that escapes me. A picture is worth a thousand words, and I pour out every single thousand I can, into a sea of black and white that never ends, only accepts all that I give unto it.

It never finishes, and neither do I.

• • • • •

There seems to be an art to this strange dance of mine, an avoidance of the things that catch and tear at my imagination. I run from the problems which I carry, as if my words are strong enough to send me far away from everything that I lack, and yet they never do.

Inevitably, the writing stops, the words end, the wellspring of thought in my mind runs dry, and I am left with this aching feeling as I stare at a page, a screen, a splaying out of words that seem to blur before my eyes, an unfinished thought, a sentence cut short, a story forgotten halfway through. And then it is left, and I am desperately chasing any feeling or fleeting that can bring this inspiration back to me, to save me from the drudgery of lacking.

I am always lacking.

I write not from experience, but from wanting. I am always wanting. And I breathe these wants, these desires, deep into the very bones of my characters, just as they ache within my own. We all want the same, these shattered, mirrored reflections I call characters, these people that populate my stories are simply me, torn to bits and pieces and scattered into a world I will never know, except that which I write.

Each one shines with a quality of myself hidden deep within them, a fear or a thought given breath, and around them I build up a shield, a persona, a distinction until I am not recognizable within them, yet still it is I, my voice in every word and doubt and love and fear.

Perhaps that is why they never grow, for I have not grown either. I am trapped within only that which I know, yet all I desire to create is that which I know not. I crave adventure and romance and fantastical worlds yet mine is one of simply mundane actions, a prison of normality keeps me from the extraordinary I desire.

I am trapped within the person that I am, and this keeps me from seeing the entirety of the worlds I wish to be.

I would will them all into existence, spill them onto a page for all to enjoy.

If I only I could write.