Writing happens to me. It guides me to bread when my knees buckle and my heart clasps in angst. Writing spares me from the thoughts that haunt me down at night: the slithering ones hide and wait, for years, until I can't lift a finger to arrest it. The thoughts scroll through my mind like your favorite cassette that buffers at the best part. Only in my case, the sequences I can't escape are the ones that seize me by the neck and bruise me across the concrete pavements, already etched with my blood. Writing becomes my call to the redeemers – man, fiction, hope, me – who'll rewind the story and illuminate the unstained path. Cope, because there is no matter how many times we try, there's no path without blemish. Yet, I write. Still.
My last lover was also a writer. (We'll call her June.) Like a rabid dog, the words also seemed to claw at June, begging to be laid down somewhere into the world. June obliged: some to me, others to friends, others through her painting and art. Four hours in dialogue, locked in the other's eyes, was child's play to us. In June, in that moment, I found a witness for my words, an alternative to the compulsion to write and grieve. Without any deliberate effort, our worlds arranged themselves against the other. When our voices faltered, we let the words do the dirty work. Then, at the first kiss of fragility, like the leaves at the start of fall, June vanished with her cassette. She glided away with the piercing, silent whistle of the night breeze. Once again, writing flattered its redeemers.
June left in January.
By June, I still floundered in January.
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See also: I Do Not Know, Drizzled Stranger, Burnout