Two Months
Two months.
21st of September I put myself back onto
the same plane I found myself on 6 months prior; every step I took through
security I could feel my insides twisting and knotting. With every weep, every
tear, every breath I could feel the small bits of my soul left cutting through
my skin like glass. I could feel the impact of the past six months on my
chest, crushing my lungs.
"You're unwell," people reminded
me, "It's okay to come home. Be with your friends and family; focus on
getting better. London will always be there, it's not going anywhere."
These words flew right past me. I held my eyelids down and creased my
forehead preparing for the hit in the face that I needed, but I was always left
with just a scrunched up face. The message wasn't getting through.
Two weeks after September 21st: I spent my
time between bed, doctor's offices, hospitals, waiting rooms in attempts to
make it feel like I was finally getting a grip of these diseases running
through my blood. But was this really the case?
I wrote that passage three months ago in a
time where I was lost for words living in an abundance of alphabets. I
could talk so fast, so pure yet my stories would be so distorted getting
tangled up in the excuses I was making.
It took me two months to get out of bed.
Not the kind when you wake up in the morning, but the kind when lying under the
blades spinning on the roof, aimlessly staring out the window felt welcoming.
Welcoming in a sense that I could deal with the blades on the roof spinning for
a purpose, but I couldn't bring myself to ease the vertigo from the world
outside that same bed spinning and jumping and expanding. I didn't see the
point; and I don't think many people do when you live in a fantasy world
created by your own imagination.
Some days I wish that the fanciful worlds
I can so easily make up would form around me; seeing the atoms, and rocks, and
water, and dirt and every product of my own imagination twirl around the empty
space in front of my eyes and perform ballet so perfectly. But this world of
perfection I so desperately long for won't ever dance a renaissance so
effortlessly for the simple fact that that once again I had let my imagination
run rampant and I couldn't bare myself to pick up the effort to face a world
without this. So I stopped writing.
I stopped writing and wasted all of the
imagination built inside me to sit in a room and become completely exhilarated
by the life I was creating. A life in this world where the sky is always blue,
and the air is always crisp with the most comfortable temperature and the sun
never too bright but still warm enough to feel behind my eyelids. Warm it was,
but in reach it was not. My journal I once dragged across the globe with
me sat on a shelf to collect dust as the ink dancing around the insides lay
dormant and bleak. I went against all advice once given to me and let my words
waste away in poorly formed idioms spoken to people who would never be able to
understand. I stopped writing and I so dearly wish could have realised
sooner than now.
I was 13 years old when I first dove into
poetry. Year eight English class, semester two. This memory, so vivid in
my mind with the plastic chairs, scratched table surfaces, the untainted
whiteboard at the front of this small, stale room, whitened luminescent beams
shone down from above. This was the first time where I was shown that forming
pen to paper didn't have to be a boring science report, or an essay on the
parts of history that would inevitably bore teenage me. Writing is the
possibility of endless opportunities; millions of different endings, romantic
gestures, searching down to the depths of your soul and letting the world know
that, through this process something miraculous has been discovered. Even if
that world is just a piece of paper or a feature article in the New York Times.
Writing is everything, and in some sense
writing to me is problem solving. I have never been mathematically
talented, I just never had the patience dealing with numbers, but searching for
the answer is something I have always competed with. I am envious of
mathematicians to a degree in a sense that they are able to find the answer to
the problem that I could never. They are able to take a mixture of numbers and
formulas and data and make sense of it all in a way that I never could. It took
me far too long to understand that I can do that also, yet the numbers are
letters and the letters form words and these words are my life. I just
use a different method to solve the problem; putting all the data onto paper,
ordering the words around the right way until the answer stares me back at the
face. I write to make sense in the world. Scientists experiment to make sense
of how the world works, as do physicists, doctors, engineers and
mathematicians. As writers, we are no different. Just trying to understand it
all, somehow.
As always,
em
`
