On Writing

I like to write. I like my fingers dancing effortlessly across the keyboard, everything just spilling out, uninterrupted, uninhibited. I love that sometimes I can type fast and hard my fingers aches but there is so more thought to follow the last and I must get it out before it consumes me.

Its nice to see what was in my head out there, kind of like saying something that will change your life, a blurb above your head but still in words.. I like the click of the buttons as each finger seamless types letters to make words to make sentences. That’s when the leap occurs. Sentences are thoughts. Its …words bring out the greatest ideas in the greatest of men and are handed down tying up humanity. But what I write is nothing as ambitious nor as momentous. Its just me. Typing. Trying to use this as a pensieve (like in Harry Potter, Dumbledore has one and I love that!). Anyway, I was outside for a smoke and was thinking about everything and every time I have written.

And it was a struggle to write, my mother and I at the kitchen table, my thumb going around the pen, overlapping my fingers on the other side, my mother losing her patience at correcting the way I write. Well Ma, it was no use, I still write like that and haven’t really met anyone else who quite writes like that. Unfortunately I don’t have the opportunity to write physically any more, everything is on the keyboard.

Love letters
The first I ever wrote was to AB. I remember aching over it, hunched over, trying to make my writing look better. I remember using a pen on a rare occasion, I always preferred pencils, allowed for correction you see. But these were feelings set in ink (stone). And I remember how I felt at the time, vaguely remember it. I wish for the life of me I knew what I had written.

I hope I can still find out. About two years ago best bud and I were at AB’s both of us drunk (she was dating MT then and we were going through her wallet and found her ex’s sports campus ID card. We ripped and chewed it even through it was laminated and I have vague recollections of spitting it into her bowl of potpourri). Anyway, she mentioned she had a ‘memory box’ (girls!) and still had it. That’s nice and I respect her for that. I think everyone should keep thinking like that, to know that once someone somewhere loved them.

I remember love notes to the Ex, so many of them, always with my signature, an S with devil horns, a halo and forked tail because she said that’s what I was. I remember writing one for almost every time I met, even small notes on the napkins at Barista, or a piece of paper and me tracing my hand out telling her that when I left, she would remember some part of me. So many love notes. When she met someone else the first time around…no, when she found out I was attracted to someone else, she threw them all out.. I was heartbroken. I felt that even if we never got back together, she should have kept it to remember how much I loved her. Ever since then, I never wrote her another note.

I tore up hers. I still have 4, one from each year around the same time, the 20^th of August, the time I would leave for the US from India and almost each one saying I would meet someone else and forget her. Ironic…it was the other way around.

I wrote one to SB too. I remember sitting on the steps of the Rotunda facing the Corner, dusk. I remember what I was wearing too, my Old Navy shorts I love so much and my half sleeves shirt which I took from my dad because I really liked it, I remember walking home after she said she needed to think, listening to Champaign Supernova, past the Nameless Field and Beta Bridge, watching the wind dance with the leaves making its own song along the way and wondering that if this was a day like another, why did I feel so very removed. I think she has since lost that note, the scatterbrained sweetheart of a girl.

Mediocrity
God how I hated and feared that word. I remember a huge argument with my mother, her pushing me to push myself and screaming that if I didn’t do well, I would forever more be mediocre, her spitting out the word that it was almost a condition and would swallow you up and you would never be anywhere or anyone. I am thankful to her for that. A few years later I realized a mediocre life isn’t a life worth living. But that’s just me. I know most people would disagree. But I remember writing I will not be mediocre and staring at the words stare at me. Kind of like looking down the Abyss and having it stare back, telling me it was waiting for me. I have since run far away from the Abyss and am hopefully still moving father and farther away from it. But I think I was 16 at the time and between that fight and reading the Fountainhead, realized I didn’t want to be just one of the people. I think I am still mediocre but when it comes to work, I know I can push harder than ever before. It’s a compulsion now, but I have long since grown up and know how to temper it, to realize that this is a life long process

Writing to my folks
I have written a handful of emails to them, the serious ones, I can literally count them on one hand. One of them, no a few have been thanking them for everything, one was just recent memory but I wanted to thank them because they were the ones who held me up for my first steps, they were the ones who heard me speak first and they are the first who will ever see me grow up and stand on my own feet metaphorically and I so hope that they smile and beam in pleasure. But I also wrote one in recent memory (year ago) berating them for making me feel like I was broke, that in New York I really needed money and had to borrow from a friend rather than them. It really wasn’t their fault. All the money in the US was managed by my Aunt, a German lady who is nice in her own way. But every time in school I needed money, for all 4 years, I would ask and she would have some hint of criticism and once she event old me to think about how hard it was for my Dad to earn money and that he would …never mind. But I hated her for making me feel like I was a burden on them and I wanted to scream and say that I knew that I had seen my Dad come home exhausted, that I had missed him enough in my childhood to know what he was doing and it wasn’t easy. Not now, much easier now but not then. Anyway, she made me feel guilty for asking them for money. And I took it out on them and how I hate the fact that I actually wrote what I wrote. Anyway, haven’t spoken to my aunt in a year and a half, not since the time I broke down and sent that email to my folks.

My first rent check
Booyah! Houston, the Eagle has landed baby, it’s here! Its my space, my place, Daddy never paid for it and I fucking rule!

I remember when I first moved in, I was sleeping in the bedroom on newspapers and didn’t even have alight in there…but you know what, I was home, my home and I loved it!

I still do though now I am going to, as best bud puts it, pimp up the place with a nice fat TV and a rug and a huge book rug and well, you get the idea. And everything in there, will be mine mine mine! I love coming home to that room, all my fancy toys, my little robot vacuum cleaner, just splaying out on my big bed and sinking in…its my space, everything I want do , I can!

Signing the check to buy tickets to treat my family on a holiday
Dang son, you’ve come along way baby! Oh yeah, my brushing it off when my Mom and Dad kinda thanked me and in hindsight it wasn’t a big deal but I think I got a huge kick out of the kick they got….say it with me Booyah!

I have written a lot, not literally, perhaps some times more than others, but each of these moments have been as important to me as the next...