Dusting the Attic

I need to rebuild the lactic acid in my pens and legal pads. That’s what they all say, isn’t it? Writing is a muscle, exercise it. Exercises of plot and character and theme and structure and point of view, all neat little blocks that fit together to make a castle, but I’m not sure I like the neat lines. When I exercised in real life I didn’t like the discipline, didn’t like the every day of it, didn’t care for the stamina and the sculpt, I wanted short bursts of energy giving me wings, absolute freedom, and days afterward of paralyzing recline. I don’t think writing should have neat lines, except the little blue ones on notebook pages, because things with neat lines are usually artificial, man-made, and I want to be a force of nature. I want to be messy, because people are messy, no matter how well they like to pretend to be put together, their brains are messy places, and I want to be human.

Still, I need to regain strength in the part of me that used to find words so easily, the part that never stumbled over synonyms or syllables, just the right rhythm for the flowing of the line, the part that let clauses melt together in one stream, a force of nature.

Instead of forced nature.

I’m scared of turning a tree into a piece of notebook paper. I’m scared of the backspace button. I think I’ve pressed it too many times to be writing freely, to be writing with only nature behind me. I think I’ve pressed it too many times to be authentic.

When I was young I didn’t care so much about how the words sounded, how perfect they had to be, I just threw them on the page and reveled in the story I was creating, all crooked handwriting and misplaced commas, and sometimes I think that is a better way to write. Before perception got in the way, and I thought about the way the words I write define me instead of themselves.

I think sometimes a piece of notebook paper is just a mirror in disguise.

I like writing in run-on sentences because it’s easier to get carried away when the sentence does, it’s easier to find the inside part of you that’s actually putting the words on the page, the part that makes the connection between a bed of roses and a bed of nails, and by the end of the sentence you’re always wondering how you possibly got there but you’re so very glad you did. I like run-on sentences.

The higher the energy, the higher the emotion, the higher the risk, the higher the reward.

I think it’s easy to get a good reward out of writing, but I think it’s hard to get a real reward out of writing. I think writing helps clean the cobwebs out of the mind, like dusting in the attic, find all the little hidden treasures in the corners you forgot about so long ago, and it feels so much bigger and cleaner once you’ve gotten all the words out.

I wonder what color the inside of my mind is. Does it change like a mood ring, morphing in big globs like a lava lamp? Is it bright or dull or pastel or nothing at all? Is it black like the ink on my notebook page and the shadow in the corner of a room?

Words that aren’t meant for anyone else’s eyes have this neat little trick where they are so much better than the words you intend to share. I think it’s because you’re more real when no one’s watching you form the letters, past present or future. You can open up a part of you that no one else can see and lift secret words from them, words that no one else can read.

And when you try to show someone the words after the fact, the words you wrote for yourself that rang so loud in the empty cavern of your head, they have this neat little trick of shriveling up and losing their luster and making you wonder why you were ever proud of them at all. They seem too strangely personal and yet not yours at all, like an ill-fitting coat you regret buying.

I don’t know why I wrote this. Partly to build up that lactic acid in my pen again, before I have to write some words that other people have to hear. Partly to clean out my attic. Partly to figure out if I ever really could write at all.