I've spent almost my entire childhood dreaming to be a writer, and spent the past few years of my college slaughtering that dream. I stopped at 18.
Almost two reams of used bond papers piled my cabinet, waiting to be burned, more than 3 dozen stories without endings...some of them were just outlines and didn't even reach any kind of introduction.
Trying to live that dream meant years of giving life to inanimate objects, and splendidly making the deaths of protagonists seemed ultmately rectifying. Some called it fiction. I called it my time-consuming attempt at writing poetry. The use of short and rhymed phrases were never really my thing, so I resorted to prose instead.
I've learned a lot in those years when I used to attend prose workshops. Professional writers would gather in a circle and have our pieces read. We'd talk about it for hours, some advised me to change the way I write, while others told me to seek out the rationale behind every move in the story. Always keep it plausible, they said.
It was a whole new timeline of complications running alongside my then-confused teenage life.
I did learn something, though. In creating art, all you need is passion...and you have to call on that. She, who taught me, called it a "muse". You have to summon your muse to guide you, she said.
So I did.
Summoning your muse was the hardest...it entails a long wait, and extreme patience for the whole process to begin. The idea, the structure, the emotions...but things were complicated. No, I was complicated. Sometimes, during those days when I stopped calling onto it, it started to show itself almost everytime I try not to succumb into getting a pen and jotting down whatever it dictates...until it started to fade away.
Weakened...yes, not gone, just slowly deteriorating beneath my cerebrum's cap of thought; slowly entangling itself with the rest of my subconscious, like a past that would rather cease to evolve than continue to battle its massacre.
It was slow torture, like the rest of the world's cry against hate and sarcasm. It was a lot like love between thousands of miles, fighting to hold on, uncertain in its own agenda.
After so many years, I summoned my muse for one last time. I wanted to know if it can still give life, if it can resurrect me. One man came, in its utmost and perfect features. So I began to write...
I could still smell his perfume as if he was seated next to me, see him laugh at a lousy song playing over the radio, hear him whisper how he loved me, and see him get excited in buying independent albums of local artists he could bring to his new home.
I tried to use the right words to say the right things, but the words ran out on me, like bullets running out of bulletholes to dig themselves into when fired. Soon, there was no space for any kind of emotion but depression.
He held my hand so tightly at the airport, and I couldn't let go. I didn't want him to let go, either..but I bit my lip and told myself that there was nothing we could do, but wait.
So, once again, despite the dreams that haunted me in the middle of the night, and the grueling slumber where the muse tried to avenge its forced annihilation by poking needle-pointed nails in the middle of my chest, I tried to write.
I wrote words that were insignificant to the sane, I wrote words that were lustful. I wrote words that made me cry my heart out from sunrise to sunrise the next day, for weeks. I didn't do anything, but write...because I know it lives.
It thrives, sometimes there to comfort me amidst the mourning of its own death, even in the distance that separates us.
It will be with me and I will call upon it, every moment of my waking hours.
And I will just be here...waiting.
