I know for a fact there is a writer in me. She is there, I know she is, I can feel her. Sometimes nudging to get out, and me surpressing her because I know she just isn’t fully grown yet, not for this. Sometimes I feel she’s growing, perhaps a teenager and I can feel her raging emotions all over the place. Sometimes she escapes like all teenagers do, in quest for new adventures, in the hope that she’ll fit in with others of her kind, trying to be recognised by her peers, trying to impress her crush who is as eloquent as they come, trying to show everyone that she too can do this thing; that its just a walk in the park for her like it is for everyone else.
But deep down she knows she isn’t ready. She admits it too, except she hates to admit anything to me. Apparently, she is supposed to disagree with everything I say, whether we both know its true or not. I know this bse I stumbled upon her journal the other day and I flipped through. I know it is wrong but I just couldn’t help it, because lets face it, she’s a part of me as much as I am of her. So somehow I deserved to know. And I am not trying to justify my breach of her privacy.
In said journal she also said she’s waiting for inspiration to strike. She said she knows she’ll know it when it comes. She wrote of the times she sometimes drifts off all of a sudden and falls in a writing frenzy, sometimes without enough writing space and so she squeezes words on a paper napkin at a coffee shop or ice cream parlour, or in a taxi and she types wildly away at her phone, sometimes exceeding her destination. Bits of many stories, ideas and thoughts that do not connect but make much sense, maybe only to her because no one else ever gets to read these.
Or how sometimes halfway through her workload she opens her wordpress draft and types away through the next hour or so, posts that never get published. I ask her about all this. I ask her why so much passion in her is still sizzling left un tapped, I ask her why she doesn’t let it all out, why she lets it bottle up in her. And she laughs in that little teenage way of hers, that way that quietly says ‘I am just fifteen, I have my whole life ahead of me’ but aloud she says its not my time yet, I’ll know it when my time is here.
But we both know what she leaves unsaid. And however much infectious her confidence is, I know she nurses a quiet fear. I know she asks herself, “what if that time never comes? What if it comes and it passes and I don’t even notice?” I don’t need to read her journal to know this. I know her as well as she knows herself, maybe better. And so she withdraws into herself in that little teenage way of hers and plugs her earphones into her ears grabs a book and heads up to her room, like she always does when we both know there is something we need to talk about but are not willing to talk about. And I am left there shaking my head and thinking how crazy teenagers are these days.
myliephish 