I thought I would be full of original fiction, or at least slick refining editing skills like a fine coat of primer applied to a chalky layer of paint.
Instead I find myself looting through my old documents and hidden files like pulling musty garments from an attic trunk.
Some are very much worth a turn in the laundry and another wear.
Some are so moth eaten and humbled by time that they probably wouldn't even be worth polishing your car.
I save this and that. Tweak a word here and there. Mostly I just read and reread and think to myself.
This is what I am meant to be doing.
I know I write a lot about the tortured existence that is being a writer, and more explicitly, one whose day job is not their passion, and ergo is even more tortured, but there is a reason I do this at three in the morning after a nine hour shift at the bakery.
I love words.
I love words the way Van Gogh loved paint; to the extent that if I had to choose between food and words, I would choose words, and then you would find me sucking on a pen, teeth blackened with ink, malnourished and witty as fuck.
If you've ever met me, then you know I also love stories. I love telling stories, the bigger, louder and more gesticulation required the better, but I also love hearing them.
I have a secret mental list of truly excellent story eliciting questions, although often they are not necessary, for we storytellers find each other through smell.
When I was six years old I had chronic ear infections and eventually underwent that operation where they insert little plastic tubes into your ears to drain all the pus out of your head. For two weeks afterward, every night I had to lie on the sofa with my head level so my mum could drip these prescription ear drops into my ear canals. Then I had to stay very still for ten minutes so the drops could work their way deep into my cochleas and do their thang.
It felt like mercury was being dribbled directly into my brain and I could taste the thin metallic sting of the medicine as it coated my ear drum and soaked ever deeper freezing my jaw and making tears run quietly out of the corners of my eyes.
To pass the twenty minute administration of these drops, my mum made up and told me stories about a little family of mice and a little family of cats who were at war with one another.
After the medicine ran out, I began asking for a story each night before bed, and my lovely mother continued to oblige me elaborating on the characters in the stories until I remember, very clearly being about ten years old, and hearing the end of the last chapter. The mice were long gone, and we had moved to the grand children of the original cats, and I'll never forget my mother winding up the series with the kittens building a hot air balloon and getting in it and leaving their parents and grandparents behind as they sailed off into the sunset. The last thing my mother added to the story was that like the kittens going off into the world to make their own adventures, it was now my turn to tell myself stories.
Pretty smart of my Mum, huh?
Her eloquent shuffle out of the spotlight as storyteller launched me into the rough hands of my father's tutelage, where I was called solemnly into the office or the living room and handed a book my dad deemed essential in the development of my tastes as a reader and charged with the challenge of completing the tome.
In this way I read Little Women, Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, and A Christmas Carol, The Chronicles of Narnia, and Anne of Green Gables all before entering middle school.
My dad gave me the thirst for a literary challenge. Just because you don't understand it, doesn't mean it won't improve your thinking processes seemed to be his lesson, and he pushed me all the way to high school shoving The Odyssey at me, A Town Like Alice and many others. On my own I sought out the works of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Douglas Adams, Roald Dahl and Shakespeare.
Begrudgingly good of my Dad too.
In my adult life, I find all too often I make excuses for not reading or writing. I'm too tired, or I can't come up with anything. I read easy books because I know I'll finish them faster and I am less inclined to pick up challenging literature due to the commitment it requires.
But deep within me I know this change is temporary. For I am still telling stories. Even when I sit in front of the computer for hours on end and can't string two damn sentences across the page. Even when I take six weeks to read a book I could have chewed through in six days five years ago. Even when I am so defeated and furious with myself I throw my pens and journal across the room and pull the covers over my head, I love words.
They always come. They paint the picture. They erase the pain. They give and they give and they allow me to give them along to you as well.
I think it was Neil Gaiman who said that 'a writer is someone for whom writing is the most difficult task in the world, and yet is compelled to do it.'
It is, and I am, and what he didn't say is that the reason you keep going back is because the words give you a king's welcome every time you return.
