by Husna Irfan
Writing can save you in your darkest dips in life, but it can also terminate you like you're just another bug
So rest, until the block that makes you knee-dive onto the ground and beg for the story to escape your fingertips
Releases itself.
For the wave that hits after,
The euphoria can be a bit too bright
Writing for some of us is an extended arm that can pull us from going overboard.
Both in terms of ending it all, to controlling ourselves from going too far with anything.
Dark, I know.
But the insufferable darkness is what stirs up writers in the dawn of each day, to give personalities to each of our demons and turn all the ones trying to pull us down - into simple adjectives.
We turn ourselves into beggars, murderers, superheroes, magicians
Characters of all kinds
Just so that the ones reading it can feel normal
So they can peer into our world through the lens of hopeless sufferers and silent angels
The world filled with so much hate and so much love
We pack a punch, with all that poetic philosophy
That we weave softly and thoughtfully in-between our lines
Whispering beneath our breath - I hope they get it
Writers, they have a way with their words
Quirky, I know.
Yet each one of us knows how desperately we try to fish for the perfect words, for the perfect sentence, the perfect structure to the perfect stories
And our brave but feeble fingers come up empty, and then the sirens for the next creative famine goes off
Blowing a strike to your heart and the voices in our heads start to bellow
Harrowing, I know.
They are hungry for success, and the dreadful fear of not reaching the unattainable goal we frame up on our walls
Starts to cook our stories into a sticky syrup of
You can't do it, you obviously can’t write it, you can't write, you can't do it, try again, never mind don't try, you can never do it, ever, stop trying.
And so, we tread carefully around the borders of our imagination
Awaiting, with sweat dripping down our back
Leaving scars of acid trails that pool beneath our feet, drowning us into misery
Tip-toeing, making sure not to wake the wild gods within us that can end it all
Writing,
it morphed me into a sick devil
Churning myself to do it all, which ended up in me starving with the identity of who I am, and what my words represent of me -
All
gone
And it's all because I didn’t let time write for me.
When you try to outlive your time,
The damnation of losing yourself is guaranteed.
But it's okay, we writers
We -
Write all of humanity in our own beautifully messed-up versions
We know so much of everything, because someone chose to write it
So write.
Write like the whole world will follow it like scripture
Write as if, they say,
Your life depends on it
Because it does.
We writers - we weren’t made to shut up and curl into a ball
We are emotional and livid and impulsive and hungry
for art,
Feed yourself art - it will disintegrate you open and release magic from within
We are made to create art so humans can survive the pain and the bliss of our world
We are guided to write
To save ourselves.
So write,
Like the demons are already dancing on your bed and you sip your coffee just waiting to create a plot twist that will send them straight down back to Satan's lap
Or maybe
You are the ruler of the underworld, controlling all evil so nothing can stop you
Because nothing can
Except yourself.
To the readers who read our life’s work, our most vulnerable self is splattered across your screen or page
You are reading our invisible tears, our cries for help, the endless breakdowns in the middle of the night and the hours of eyes burning in the light
Simply drink from our prose and poetry
Quench the thirst of your dying curiosity and imagination
Enter the portal into our world whenever you want to escape life
If that happens
Then
Writers, we did it.