Countdown

Sometimes I sit and listen to the seconds tick by on my watch. I hold my pen in my hand and tell myself any second now I’ll write something. I’ll figure out how to write down what’s in my head without worrying about how it sounds. Tick, tick, tick. My watch mocks me and my heart clenches.

It makes me think of Captain Hook’s fear of clocks. This is who I’m becoming with every passing year. Most women my age associate clocks and ticking with their biological clocks, the time to have children slipping through their fingers. I associate mine with the amount of time that’s passing me by as well, but it’s time in which I should be writing something great and instead I’m writing this. It makes me wonder what will happen once the ticking stops.

I think about all the things I always said I would do: buy a rolltop desk and a typewriter. Sit at it with my lava lamp nearby and write my novels. Travel the world: Japan, Paris, Amsterdam, Australia. Maybe do some volunteer work, maybe learn how to sculpt pottery, maybe learn how to paint. Who knows, maybe I’m not destined to be the next award winning bestselling novelist, maybe I’m supposed to be the next Dali.

Whatever it is that I’m meant to do, I cannot see beyond these ticking second hands to figure it out. All I can hear, smell, taste, feel is the constant ticking. Tick, tick, tick, tick. 

 

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These Words

As I was sitting in my car this afternoon, waiting to pick the Girls up from school as I do every day at the same time, I once again told myself I was going to write something. Something I can be proud of. I thought of all of the writers, bloggers as well as novelists, hell, even Indie writers- that I admire so much for writing, for beginning something and finishing it, no matter the quality. Once again I told myself, I’m going to do THAT. I will.

How many years in a row have I told myself this? 27, that’s how many. TWENTY-SEVEN. And still I have nothing to show for it except for a ton of blog posts, a few pieces of flash fiction and more half-finished stories than I can count. Stories that make me cringe when I read back over them.

Not all of my words make me do this. Sometimes I read back over my blog posts and think to myself, “That was kinda pretty. It made my eyes do something weird, made them kinda damp (I don’t cry so damp is the best adjective I could think of to describe the function…) It didn’t totally suck…” There’s more times than not that I read over my past pieces of writing and think to myself, “What the hell was I thinking?? What did those words even mean??”

But through writing is the only way I know how to. How to anything. When I’m angry? I write a bloody story, violent words with gory imagery- things I usually shred afterwards because I always have an irrational fear that my words will somehow be brought to life and because I wrote them to life somehow, I’ll end up being the guilty one, no matter that more than likely I will be innocent. When I’m sad? I’ve started writing things that might be considered poetry but that I don’t know if I could actually categorize as poetry because I’ve never really seen myself as any kind of poet, as much as I would love to be. When I’m afraid my writings come out more as ramblings. Long, drawn out posts about the neverending lists of what if’s that I’m so good at conjuring up every second of ny existence. Writing is the only way I can communicate.

Too often I find myself at a loss for spoken words. I can never quite find the ones most appropriate for the situation, the occasion, the moment. I open my mouth and the most ridiculous nonsense comes out- nonsense that not even I would buy if I heard it spoken from the mouth of another. It’s embarrassing really. But when I write, it’s not this way. When I start to pour the words out onto paper, tap them out onto the screen, they come out exactly the way I meant for them too, even if they don’t come out the way I meant them to at all.

When I write, it’s the only time I am. It’s the only time I am anything. When I write, it’s the only time I am at peace. I can let go of it all, all the crap that I carry around day in and day out- the crap I have carried around for so long, my whole life. When I write, it’s the only time I am free. I can create a world all my own, my own design with my own laws and rules, my own scenery, my own anything and everything. It’s all mine.

When I write, it’s the only time I am at peace. It’s how I let go of the pain, the frustration, the negtivity. It’s how I start to heal. It’s how I make myself whole again.

One day, I’ll write something wonderful. Every day, I try to write something honest, something beautiful. One day, I’ll write something that’s wonderfully, beautifully honest. And until then, I’ll simply keep writing. 💖