THAT PLACE
The voice says write. And not write because you have something to say, but rather write or else you won’t have anything else to say again. This year—or rather these last few months of the semester were good for proofing, good for finishing up works already done ,but crippled for writing. Maybe because my life, my relationships, were all stuck in winter. What did I say to myself when I looked at Ben? Our relationship has come to the place where all of my most powerful friendships are sabotaged. It is time to end this. Let me end this. There were self destructive parts of me and three fourths of him are self destructive, no wonder things came to blows so often. It was a long time before we could come to something like sanity. All of that drama helped leech away the ability to write.
And it wasn’t time to write, either. I tried, but it wasn’t time. It was time to finish, to edit, to proof, to—yes, imagine this—to live. And time to reassess. This will be the first time in a long time that I have had in m life—a best friend who is physically at my side—and it is also the longest time I’ve gone without writing.
What will it mean now? To write? It was, for some time, my chief religion, my only vocation and—in some ways—the companion I trusted. When Ben exhausted me, and I thought that he didn’t understand or care about anything I said and everyone else was too far away it was what I retreated to—unsuccessfully. Now , if writing isn’t any of the old things, what will it be ?
The best answer I can come up with is that when I write I experience something that isn’t so true in my everyday life: fearlessness in the face of ambiguity, a richness of mercy and a suspension of all judgment. It isn’t that once I reach that place I can write again. Rather it is in the writing that I reach it.
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