Apologies, Lies, and Promises

I can’t seem to grasp this blog. Perhaps it is because the tapping on the keys and the glare of the screen is too rigid, too straight edged, too suddenly-everything-that-I hate.

I was raised on the slither of ink across paper. Nurtured by the percuilar essence of those blue lines jailing the substance underneath to lie still – lay open and pale and white and dead. I inscribed my thoughts with a flashlight in one hand and my own blue-or-black-bleeding heart in another and those words may fade and they may bleed and they may tear and burn and crumple – but yet, those are ok with me. Because they are me. And I can burn and bleed and crumple and if my words bleed, they bleed and the ink sinks back down into the ground. If my words burn, the flames illuminate the night and then will fly high into the twilight as gasses, and sink low to the earth – ashes to the ground. If my words are crumpled, perhaps my trash – one mistake of mine, will allow another to take it, spread it out, listen to the phrases that had been carved into the dead-white page and maybe – that trash of mine will be smoothed out and those words will take on a new meaning to the heart of another.

My words on paper remain.

But on this glass-and-plastic piece-of-shit that society has chained me to, my words are fiction. They stomp across the page in militaristic fashion. They are communism against my cursive-chicken-scratch-script that dances rhytmically to my terror, my agony, my enlightement, my serenity. My words are not alive in the back-lit screen that glares into my irises and dares me to look away. My words are another click of a mouse, another share of a like, another glance in a thousand and another plug pulled. A light switch. A dead battery. A broken screen. An error message. My words – cannot be burned here. They can not be crumpled or torn or bent or folded or coveted. They are gone in a click. Gone in a power outage. Gone like fire without the embers. Bleeding without the black and blue.

 

Forgotten.

I cannot touch, cannot feel. And this is my conundrum in this white-screened world of fictionality. I will attempt at conforming and throwing these thoughts through space time and time again, but truly, as my mind grows numb at the sound of the clicking, as my fingers obediently fly over rigid black squares, I lust after a page of white, a pen of onyx, and a silent world that cannot be googled.

 

 

 

I Guess, I Should Write

I was sitting in her office, the New Hampshire afternoon light streaming in through the small window on my right, illuminating her face, her graying hair, her weathered face. And she had my words in her hand, with pencil marks instead of red ink – for some reason that stuck with me. Maybe because it was less harsh, more a comfort, or a little push in the right direction, instead of a big, glaring “NO” on my margins. 

But what she wrote was not what I was used to – and what she said took my breath away. 

“This is what a writer sounds like, Lisa,” her eye contact was serious behind her glasses, and she leaned into me, a small upturn of the right side of her mouth. Meredith Hall, a New York Times bestselling author, was telling me that I was good. I was good at the same thing she was good at. And she asked me what I wanted to do after graduation, only a few months away, and asked if I wanted to write, would I want to write, I should write. And I told her I wasn’t sure, that I didn’t think I could produce a book, make money, build a career. But she was adamant about it. Get a job as a waitress, she said. Write everyday. 

She believed in me. And after two years setting my writing aside, after barely reading, barely writing, focusing on travel, on experience, on adrenaline, I think I need to start again. I think I need to turn this into something.