Writing to be

Why do we write? Do we write our existence to save it from the effacement of time, or do we write, to give our thoughts and emotions, a substantial body? Much as we would like to claim the writing as a recording of history, it is also a form of re-writing over factual events itself. Writing is not necessarily cathartic, nor is it strictly narrative in nature. Sometimes what we realize in words does not bring any form of relief, nor does it essentially bears a story to tell. For all you know, it might be about nothing at all, if this statement in any sense, prove to be self-reflexive for my ponderings thus far.

If you would think this, as an emptying of Pandora’s Box, then I’m afraid this time it isn’t. I cannot place the act of writing within any single definition. If writing is an art, then it is having the space of a desk before you, the trickle of time ahead of you, to let your thoughts roam and express themselves in a language, real yet exploring the latitudes of imagination. If it is play, it is also exertion. For writing is to me at times, a tedious negotiation that seeks to resolve, the intense conflicts of the mind.

But writing is not about word play, which is something I have come to realize. Writing is beautiful, only when it lends shape to a seemingly beautiful thought, story, person. Writing for the sake of writing something beautiful, is at times superfluous, never as real. Like I’ve said, writing lies between resolving and imagining, and the final realization, a distilling of thoughts themselves.

Through writing, you come to embrace who you are, a person bearing the contradictions of the world. You come to face the lies that creep upon your very own consciousness. I think more than ever, writing has made itself to be, a returning to something that was first loved and often rebuked, that which lies between a reading and a writing. It is the intimacy of the person that seeks to pen, a certain narrative; the inclination that seeks to tell his friends, a little poem, he love so dearingly.

Emily Dickinson

The bulbs are in the sod –
the seeds in homes of paper
till the sun calls them.