seraphwings
There was this girl who used to write.
She wrote a lot, actually. Her head was always spilling words, sentence on sentence, and if she had a tape recorder she could hold near her ear to record it all she would have had a hundred books already. She wrote, and it felt good. People seemed to like what she wrote; that felt good, too. It seemed so very easy. Effortless. Like relaxing a muscle that had been holding something back.
This was years ago.
And the crazy came.
She can’t remember any specific moment, just that gradually things like leaving the house didn’t seem as easy anymore. Terrible things seemed more likely. Simple tasks became impossible. Don’t run the dryer - it’ll catch fire and kill everything you love. Don’t answer the phone. Don’t go out there. Don’t think about what might be happening. Don’t think.
Don’t.
The stories helped. The feedback, kind words, enthusiasm of strangers helped. The stories still came but life had stopped. It was hard to breathe. Nothing was worth the effort. Eventually, she knew, life would stop, and that seemed like a nice thing. She just had to be patient. She wouldn’t do it herself - never. But she didn’t want to do anything else but wait.
Eventually, she caught on that maybe this wasn’t how a brain was supposed to work.
Medication.
Different ones, colorful ones, large ones, small ones, expensive ones. Some that made her sick, some that made the room tumble. Some that made her bigger and smaller in turns.
One that worked.
Sort of.
Life untangled. The dryer was safe. The things she loved were all right. There was no killer out there in the dark, and she didn’t have to listen to phantom screams anymore. Quite nice, actually.
Except.
The stories were gone.
Just.
gone
She tried, but the page stayed blank and the cursor blinked. The words had fled with the crazy, as though the two had come hand in hand. What if they had? What if it was the crazy that had made her write stories that seemed to be of acceptable quality? What if imagination was madness and she’d thrown everything away, the baby with the bathwater? Should she go back? Were the stories worth it? Could she keep herself going with words?
Blank pages.
Unfinished stories, waiting patiently. Incomplete. Guilt for having ever started them.
It was easy to let time pass. She wasn’t waiting to die anymore, she was living, but she was silent. It hurt, the way a broken tooth hurts when the nerve is exposed, the jolt when you touch at it (she knows this pain now, too, and ohhhh nelly.) Easy to let it slide, though now and then a sentence submerged and she would think, Oh, that’s not bad…
But blank pages.
She tried Twitter. Maybe if the words came out in spurts, 140 character gasps, maybe it would be enough. It helped for a little bit, but the stories she made on Twitter required the cooperation of other characters, other strangers, friends now, but they faded in time and she was left there. A post here and there to keep the followers from thinking she’d abandoned them on purpose.
I’m sorry.
I’m so sorry.
This morning she had an odd thought, while she was missing the stories, missing the community who listened to them so kindly. She spent last night rereading, wanting to remember the way the world had felt back them. She had a funny thought that maybe she still could write, maybe the words were still in her, waiting, but the crazy had found a new way to ruin her. Maybe the crazy was what told her the stories she tried to make were shit, that no one cared anymore, that the audience had left. And why did she need an audience so badly any way? Shouldn’t it be enough to create?
Should she try?
No one’s listening.
The world moved on.
But I’m going to explode if I don’t figure out something.
Write. Try it. Once a day, just try it. Write something new, write something old. Add a line here. Spill it. Maybe someone misses you. You were someone once, I think. Look, you have your own tag.
Fuck.
Once a day.
This is day one.