Writing is a funny thing.
I was five. I didn’t know how to read or write, but she walked out through the front door, down the iron stairs, and never returned. She was black and blue, and I was covered in red. He stayed into the late hours of the night to finish painting my walls.
My best friends were angels, but I lived with demons. Even if I wanted to, I couldn’t write about it.
Writing is a funny thing.
I was eleven, pregnant with ideas, a world full of imaginary friends. They were aliens and monsters, animals and humans, fairies and wizards. Socrates was tried, and I wept at Plato’s feet.
I was under the olive tree, writing about it for the first time, when they came and dragged me into the shadows to steal what innocence remained. I was punished, they were free. I feared writing about it.
Writing is a funny thing.
I spent hours upon hours writing, singing, dancing. One day, I would be who I was destined to be.
Saramago told stories of blindness, but my eyes were wide open.
I was fourteen in a world of violence. A knife to my stomach, a foot to my back, and a punch to the head. My body hit the floor. Their voices were so quiet, and from that moment on, the world never sounded the same. I roamed the streets, asking why, but no answer ever came. I wanted to write about it, but they warned me against it.
I was sixteen, oh so full of wonder, running up and down the streets with the world at my feet, naive to the dangers still lurking in the shadows. No two cities are the same, or so I thought, when I ran from the demons, never to return.
The car flew through the air, red painted the asphalt and the memories were scattered through the fields. I don’t remember. I couldn’t if I tried, so I never wrote about it.
Writing is a funny thing.
Was I twenty? Fernando Pessoa wrote love letters. Florbela Espanca knew what it meant to be a poet. Edgar Allan Poe wept for Lenore. And I was in love.
The words left my body like an overflowing river, prose and poetry ripping through the tips of my fingers to bleed onto the page. The ancient gods watched as I sang praise to them. I was happy. I was happy. I was not.
Writing is a funny thing.
I was 23 with life growing in me, yet I was dead inside. No books shielded me, locked doors to keep me inside and stop me from seeing the world. There was no family, there were no friends.
There were his hands around my throat, and unborn life slipping away.
The bags by the door, glass shattered across the floor, the stench of alcohol on his breath. The streets became my home, and there was no paper nor pen.
I can’t remember how I survived.
I was 30, away from the motherland, created anew. Writing was nothing more than a distant memory now. I had forgotten the immense pleasure it once brought me. Perhaps I had forgotten who I was entirely.
I drifted through the years draped in oblivion, not the metaphorical kind, but the kind that dethrones even the strongest ones.
Writing is a funny thing.
I was 30. The next day, I was 36. There was prose and there was poetry. There were genres and subgenres. There were short stories and newsletters. There were platforms and people with degrees. Not me.
I had no memories, no sense of rhythm, no knowledge of rhyme. A library sat in my back room, but the words were oil slipping through my eager fingers. Holding onto something was a battle I was losing too fast, so I packed a notebook and pen, sat in my backyard, and tried once more to write.
No one listened, and I remembered what it meant to weep.
Pages grew beneath unsteady fingers. They called it a draft and I believed them.
They convinced me that those who write are writers and I believed them.
They never knew. They never knew. But they told me I was someone, and I let myself believe in them.
Writing is a funny thing, isn’t it?
I don’t remember. I can’t remember.
But still, I choose to write.