I don't know what this feeling is. This odd pain that strikes suddenly and without warning. Perhaps it is fear of life, within such easy reach now, and no less terrifying than on the day I was dragged into this world. There's a wondrous kind of exhilaration in it, and a choking, paralyzing fear. Hope and hopelessness interspersed, boredom, strength and weakness, beauty and ugliness, playing across me now like emotions, so strong they make me gasp for breath.
It strikes me now like sudden inspiration, but realizing that the world is coming for you is neither inspiring nor comforting. It is terrifying in every sense of the world, in all the senselessness of the world. You wonder if you're good enough, smart enough to face the world in all it's horrifying scale.
I look around me, at the shady outlines of books packed onto their shelves, their shapes as familiar to me as the stars above. This is my life, and I'm grasping at it, trying not to let it slip away. Pages flutter as cool air slips through the open window, spiderwebs break between my fingers as the wind throws my thoughts as it does the pages, scattering them to the winds. Words are scrawled, incoherent, across the glaring white screen that gently illuminates the creased shirts and ketchup stains, waiting for my fingers to bring them to glorious life once again. Unspoken, unread, unwritten, they are meaningless now. They wait with strained patience for me to breathe the life into them.
I've always wanted to be neat, meticulous, my life clean-shaven, smooth to the touch. My reflection of myself flickers in the firelight, different in every way from the dull and the boring. It isn't me, of course, none of it is, it never can be. This is my life, the cool darkness and the glow of the computer screen, the leaking fountain pen in my fingers, the words waiting for the breath that will let them live again.
I think we all craft reflections of ourselves. They resemble the people we would like to be, with the soft skin and the massive intelllects we wish were ours. These reflections flutter through our lives on fairy-tale wings. We would like to be these people, we want others to see us as these people, but to truly live we must look beyond that and see the truth. It doesn't have to be ugly. Ugliness is a perception. Beauty exists where we choose to see it. I am trying to see it in myself, but I have caught only the faintest glimmer; gold shining beneath the surface, but I'm scared to get my feet wet. There it remains, for now.
We all want to be more than we can be. That makes us human, our one universal, exquisite flaw. I choose to see it like that. It is false hope, but I have always thought that false hope is a beautiful thing, and we can no more choose not to feel it then we can choose to grow wings and fly. Why do we write? Because it allows us to become the people we wish we were. When we write we can travel to wonderful, impossible places. We can be cleverer, faster, stronger. Just for a moment, we can life the life we wish we had. That is also why we read.
Writers always exist as the fly on the wall, the unappreciated genius, the one on the sidelines, never really playing the game. It's a strange kind of pain, to be blessed and doomed to always go unnoticed. The friend of a friend, the wallflower. Me, I want to be a star in the sky, a beacon a guardian, burning bright a million miles away from anything important or painful. Every so often a human being will gaze up at me and I will see their hope. False, misguided, a pain beyond all I shall ever knew. An unbearable, indescribably beautiful kind of pain. A beauty beyond all I shall ever behold.
We are not the interesting people, we are never the main character. We are the ironic narrators, watching, understand, drying not to feel the pain we see in the eyes of others. Buckling beneath the world. Our fingers are ink-stained. We have one future, one purpose, on goal, one irresistible path set out before us. We are the admirers, the knights in the battered armor watching the brave scale the walls of their destiny. Ours is a neat, cobbled road somewhere far away. We are not made for glory or beauty or fine things. Ink runs through our veins, a slow poison killing us day by day. Our minds astound us, full of stories we shall never tell. We cannot stop crying for the world, because of the world.
We always understand, we are always afraid. We are the dreamer, the liars, the flightless butterflies.
We are writers.
©EmmaTobin 2013
