Still Here

Quite a while since you've written anything, hasn't it? How are you doing? What's new?
What's new? My heart's still broken. It breaks every day. Some days worse than others.

Does he know that?
I tell him. But he ends up crushing it even more.

How do you get up in the morning? 
With prayer.

Are you happy? 
Yes.

Really?
Reality is positive. It's a challenge sometimes, but we all try to live with what we've been given.

You're getting old.
Yes, I am.

What are you doing with your life?
I am simply living. What's wrong with that?

How can you say you're happy?
I'm alive. I have people who love me. I have a job that fulfills me. God has blessed me with His grace. What's not to be happy about?

Then why do you feel like you're dying?
Because I can't have what I want. We suffer when we can't have what we want.

What do you want?
Him.

Why?
Because I love him. What a stupid question.

Why do you love him?
Why is the sky blue? Why do giraffes have long necks? Why does the rain fall harder in one place and doesn't fall at all in another? Why is the moon beautiful? It's one of those questions that really don't have an answer. You just know it's true.

Then fall in love with someone else.
I tried. But the affection is too deep. It'll take a one-way trip to a faraway country.

Wasn't that your plan anyway since you were a girl? To be far away from here?
Yes, but he taught me that it doesn't matter where you are. You only need a desire to broaden your reason.

So now you don't want to go?
No, I want to. I want to desperately. Both as an escape and to fulfill that dream. He did say to distance myself if it becomes unbearable. And well, it is becoming unbearable.

How unbearable?
Let's just say that when I'm alone with my thoughts, I end up crying until my heart feels like a crumpled balloon.

Aren't you tired?
Sometimes I'm so tired I can't even cry.

How about now?
I feel like jumping off a building.

Why don't you?
This manuscript's deadline is tomorrow. And I need to be in two weddings. I can't die.

You're just being hormonal.
No. I'm being a woman.


What's your birthday wish?
I want to go away. Far from here. Where no one knows me. To start fresh.

Isn't that running away?
Yes. I want to run away.

Then why are you still there?
Why are you still there?
Why are you still there?

Why are you still there?

save me

I just realized, after months of trying to quit smoking and failing, that I am miserable.

I have lost something, which I thought I would recover over time, permanently and completely. I feel so angry almost all the time, and I can't enjoy the things that used to sweep me off my feet in joy. I have lost the ability to write, and now I'm afraid that I am also losing the desire. 

So many people have taken their lives recently, and I had to wonder if I would ever come to that point of hopelessness and worthlessness. The pains that I have hoped would heal gets bigger and bigger, eating away at my heart, my love for people, my sense of self-worth.

I have begged Christ not to leave me, to please, please stay with me, but he seems to disappear through the storm. And I am like Peter, drowning in my fears, screaming, "Lord, save me!" I am trying to remember Christ and his face, the way he looks at sinners like me with mercy and understanding. But Satan's hand is pointing at me, and I can't see Christ anymore. 

Please, don't go away. Don't leave me.

But why do I feel so alone, so cut off from the rest of the world? Why does the joy I find in his company, in the laughter of my family, in the care of my friends, dissipate too soon? I want to go back to that time when I feel happiest staying at home reading all day. To that time when I enjoy movies best when I watch them by myself at the cinema. When I can walk around without being scared of being seen by the wrong people.

I am very, very tired. I want to disappear.


"Take courage. It is I. Do not be afraid."
"You can do this. You're God's champion, remember?"
"Never forget your first love."
"There are people who care about you."
"You are loved."
"You are not alone."

Enough. Enough now.

Muse

She has gone for so long, perhaps too long. She has indulged me at times with whispers of her ghost or glimpses of her shadow, but I had not seen the complete splendor with which she has always graced my soul whenever I felt the need to summon her.

Now she's here. And I suddenly don't want her.

She looks the same. Same shoes. Longer hair. She looks a little disheveled, perhaps even malnourished. She looks at me with tired eyes, her breasts robbed of the suppleness that always seduced me. The roses that once grew on her skin have all but withered, leaving only a pale and barren expanse of limbs, torsos, fingers, and a face haunted by the memory of a smile.

I don't know what to do with her. I don't know what she wants.

I want to tell her to go away, but I can't. It seems that I still love her, even if she has lost the light that made her so beautiful. The sea in her eyes has almost dried up, but she reminds me that there is always hope in almost—the ocean, like her heart, will beat again with bounty, and the sky will breathe life into her like it always does when she finds herself suffocated by its vastness.

Where did she go? I stop myself from asking because it doesn't really matter. What matters is that she's come back to me. My prodigal muse has come back.

"Welcome home," I tell her with a kiss.

Was it a smile that moved between her lips? Maybe so. She looks too weak to smile, but I owe it to myself to wonder.

No thanks

There's this guy who works in the finance-lending office near my apartment building, and I was buying some stuff in the convenience store next door.

"Hi," he says.

I look behind me to make sure I'm the one he's talking to. No one else is there. "Hey," I say out of politeness.

"You're really cute."

This immediately makes me uncomfortable. I choke out a hesitant thanks.

"Do you wanna go out?"

"No, I'm busy, and I don't know you."

"I'm K**."

"Right."

"I have a car outside."

I look outside and see his Toyota Avanza. I roll my eyes in my head and force out a smile.

"Do you go out often?"

Please go away already and let me buy my fucking chips.

"Sometimes."

"Where?"

"Anywhere nice."

"Do you go to IT Park?"

Do I look like I live an Amish existence?

"Of course."

"Have you been to Figola?"

"A couple of times, yes."

"Well, I'm one of the owners."

I guess that was supposed to be impressive.

"Do you have a boyfriend?"

"No."

"Can I have your number?"

This about does it for me. I couldn't hide the irritation from my face anymore. He stops, startled by the acidic reaction that resulted from his question, but he brings back that smug look on his face. "Can I have your number? We can hang out sometime."

Please fuck off and annoy someone else. I roll my eyes, this time for real. "No thanks."

I run out the store, annoyed that I didn't even get to buy my chips. I guess in this day and age, if a guy has a car, owns a club, and has fortunate looks, every girl is entitled to go out with him. But fuck you, jock, who think you can get every girl you think is "cute" because you have abs under your shirt. Fuck you, business owner, who think you can take out any girl in your newly washed SUV because you have ten digits in your back account. Not every girl wants you.

 I definitely don't want you.

Sketches

I haven't sketched in a long time, let alone actually paint. I have long forgotten the principles of chiaroscuro, the dynamics of mixing and creating colors, the rudiments of drawing out meticulous detail that the human face demands on art. What is left of me is just this chaos, these aimless curves and lines that collide and collapse over each other to find, on good days when the light is pleasant, a recognizable form. 

I don't even know what made me draw that. I think I did this after watching a random romance on TV. (I'm still only just a girl—no matter how disgusting romantic clichés get, they will always pierce through my reason and make me swoon.)

This I made after devouring a book of erotic Filipino poetry and art. Let's just say this is the more decent option of dealing with the literary catharsis.

Of this I am particularly proud because it turned out rather well—I didn't expect I'd get her cheekbones right and the way her facial lines cast shadows on her jaw. It's not very good by academic artistic standards I'm sure, but compared to my other drawings, this is easily one of my best. Hannah Arednt is one of my most favorite female philosophers, and when I saw that poster of her biopic I knew I just had to have a piece of her myself. I couldn't quite capture how she holds her cigarette though, so I just settled for that darkly shaded mess of a hand. 

I only ever draw when I can't write, when words fail to describe the temporary fever that I find overwhelming when I see a face that makes me stop. The way a smile painfully curves, the way skin sinks into facial recesses, the melancholy twinkle in the eye, the robust contour of a nose— sometimes there aren't enough valleys and flowers to turn them into poetry. They have to take shape through my hands, no matter how flagrantly I disregard artistic conventions of shadows and light and proportion. 

I guess there are just some benefits of chaos.

On the Sand

Sometimes, you gotta take your book places.

“One benefit of Summer was that each day we had more light to read by.”

― Jeannette Walls, The Glass Castle

French Lessons

I had better start opening my French books again. It feels horrible to not be able to construct a decent sentence anymore. Thinking about it now, I wonder why I stopped in the first place. Maybe because I've given up hope of being accepted into a comparative literature program in a US university. And it somehow scares me that I'm not even bothered anymore, that I'm starting to entertain the idea of not leaving for postgraduate studies altogether. I guess I'm slowly losing sight of the point of needing to pay outrageous sums of money to study about things I can read about at home (I can't believe I'm saying this). And the way things are at universities today—the mechanization of the humanities, the academic approach of study that I now find superficial—it takes away the original beauty of literature and makes of it a mere specimen to be clinically taken apart and analyzed.

Poetry supplies beauty in my life, and reading saves me from falling into the traps of boredom and nihilism that postmodern mentality elaborately but surreptitiously orchestrates. Do I really need a degree from a fancy university to prove to myself that I can understand and appreciate literature? Of course I don't. A child can read Peter Pan or Robinson Crusoe and appreciate the beauty of its language and reality without needing to associate it with pompous and complicated ideologies.

Marxism, feminism, structuralism—there was a time when I genuinely found joy in studying them. I felt pride whenever I read something and could immediately identify the theories with which I could approach their text. I loved how well I could use words like bildungsroman or iambic pentameter or factive heteronomy and reveled how people seemed to be so impressed whenever I did. But after a while, I found that I was slowly losing the joy from reading because I was always consumed by a priori thinking. I approached everything I read as if they were frogs I needed to dissect in a laboratory. I hated it. So I stopped reading altogether.

What resuscitated my heart for literature was philosophy and theology. Through it I rediscovered the depth and meaning I guess I've always looked for in poetry and prose. I read Shakespeare, Austen, Dostoyevsky, Kafka, Orwell, Camus with newborn eyes and felt a deeper kind of appreciation for the humanity with which they informed their works and admiration for the beautiful poetry through which they fashioned their language.

Alors, est-ce que tu parlez français? 

Petit un peu. 

Do I still want to learn French? Bien sûr!

But not anymore so I could arrogantly splash "I speak French" in university applications. Not even so I could brag to anyone that I can articulate rolled r's. But just because I genuinely want to. It's such a beautiful language. And besides, I've already started reading Camus's L'Etranger in French (although this was over a year ago when I still can read past two sentences without consulting a dictionary), why not just finish it? 

So yes, this summer, I will start opening my French books again. 

My Favorite Bukowski

and of course, this, which made me laugh and fall out my chair (almost):

The Dream of a Ridiculous Girl

The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, Petrov (1997)

I know it's a bad idea to read Dostoyevsky when you're depressed because he doesn't exactly tell happy stories. The magic of Dostoyevsky's books however has always been in their honest and childlike depiction of reality. I use childlike not in the sense that it's good for children or that it's simplistic but childlike because he always seems to imbue a certain innocence of mind in his language.

There are only a select number of books that I can read when my mind is reeling with unhappy thoughts and my chest bombarded by unwholesome feelings. One of those is Dostoyevsky. His stories are always a forceful slap in the face that eventually become a gentle caress. "Look this way, at reality, for all its sufferings and joys. Face it with honesty and humility," he seems to be saying.

"The Dream of a Ridiculous Man" is about a nameless man who has been trying to shoot himself every night for the past couple of weeks. He has irrevocably decided to do it tonight, but not before meeting a little girl (see painting) who desperately asks for his help, which he refuses. He goes home that night thinking about her and feeling ashamed of himself (although he justifies his refusal to help). He falls asleep on his armchair and this is where the dream begins (if you want to know what it is, read it yourself; it's only five chapters long).

A dream! Was it really a dream? Could the human mind formulate a dream so elaborate, so chronologically solid? Whatever it was, it changed the ridiculous man when he woke up and made him even more ridiculous. He saw an earth that was uncorrupted by sin and fell in love with it but at the same time witnessed it turn into the same world that he had wished to leave using his revolver. The strange thing was that he found a new appreciation for this corrupted world, a kind of love that is consubstantial with suffering. A sad kind of love, if you may.

Dostoyevsky has once again cleared my vision polluted by the unsatisfaction and selfishness endemic to sentimentalism. This story reminded me of how much I loved the world and the people in it—the silent splendor of nature, the fluid existence of humans and the mysterious looks in their eyes when they think. They are all beautiful. Reality is beautiful.

I woke up today feeling grateful. I looked at the children who rode in the jeepney with me and was amazed at the wide-eyed wonder with which they looked at everything. At that moment, I wished I could be like them, that I could see the world again and be enchanted by its wonders. I realized that it's really all you need to be happy: to see reality with the eyes of a child.

And what does it matter if I get sad and lonely sometimes? Isn't that only testament to my humanity? What does it matter that I suffer if it allows me to love deeply and truthfully? So thank you. Thank you, Dostoyevsky, for waking me up and making me realize that dreams, no matter how ridiculous, are sometimes necessary to face and appreciate reality.

Self-Crushing

The mind of a writer, or those who think they are, is frightening. There always seems to be a cloud of depression and self-doubt looming above you, imprisoning you in the mindset that you're not good enough—or ever will be. You read books and get the courage to rise above whatever emotional stupor you're battling only to sink bank into the void.

Sometimes I wish I was one of those who can enjoy swimming at the surface, who never think what the deeper waters hold and who do not desire to go there. They always seem to be happier.

What destroys me is the pain brought by words. Especially if they are cruel, especially if they have been said by someone I love. It is easy for me to forget a punch that it is for me to forget a verbal insult. A stranger once called me fat and ugly when I was in fifth grade, and I carried those words with me until I was well into college. Even now they still haunt me although I have heard them refuted a hundred times. With a word, I easily fall apart.

My mind sometimes scares me. And sometimes I wish there was a way to shut it all out, to go to sleep and never wake up again. Sometimes I wish I never wake up.

I read the stories of other people who write and have begun to wonder if this self-crushing inadequacy, if this chronic depression is endemic, maybe even necessary, to those whose lives lie in the vertical axis where words reside. The world is joyful—why can't I see it sometimes? Why am I always trapped inside a catastrophic train of thought that makes me so sad?

Someday, I told myself when I first decided I wanted to write, you will be good enough. Not perfect, just good enough. Good enough to face reality. Good enough to love and be loved back. Good enough to write. What I'm realizing is I'm never good enough, and perhaps I will never be.

To my eleven-year-old self, I'm sorry. I'm sorry that I didn't grow up to be the person you dreamed about. I'm sorry that I'm such a disappointment.

Be Free

I don’t know what freedom looks like, but I’m guessing it looks a lot like a bird. Or dandelions. Or anything at all that sails on the wind. It would probably smell like the earth on mornings, especially after it’s been raining and the sun has just come out—moist and soft and warm. If it could sing, it would probably sound like the calm breaths of an ocean at dawn, a majestic kind of silence that only manifests itself in very special moments.

No, I cannot be sure about any of this. I am not sure how my senses can perceive freedom. But I am sure of one thing: I am free.

And you. You don't need a certificate or a government or a religious sect to tell you that you're not free. You were made free. In your heart you must know that, that in every situation you have a choice. You can't ever say "I don't have a choice." Just the fact that you can say that you don't have a choice already says that you do! So make good choices. Make choices that will not hurt you or the people around you. Educate your freedom with truth and exercise it with love. Don't just be free. Be good.

How To Be Alone

If you are at first lonely, be patient.

If you’ve not been alone much, or if when you were, you weren’t okay with it, then just wait. You’ll find it’s fine to be alone once you’re embracing it.

We can start with the acceptable places: the bathroom, the coffee shop, the library where you can stall and read the paper, where you can get your caffeine fix and sit and stay there, where you can browse the stacks and smell the books. You’re not supposed to talk much anyway so it’s safe there.

There is also the gym. If you’re shy, you can hang out with yourself and mirrors; you can put headphones in.

Then there’s public transportation because we all gotta go places.

And there’s prayer and mediation. No one will think less if you're hanging with your breath-seeking peace and salvation.

Start simple. Things you may have previously avoided based on your avoid-being-alone principles: the lunch counter where you will be surrounded by chow-downers, employees who only have an hour and their spouses work across town, and they, like you, will be alone.

Resist the urge to hang out with your cellphone.

When you are comfortable, eat lunch and run, take yourself out for dinner to a restaurant with linen and silverware. You’re no less an intriguing a person when you are eating solo dessert and cleaning the whipped cream from the dish with your finger. In fact, some people at full tables will wish they were where you were.

Go to the movies where it’s dark and soothing, alone in your seat amidst a fleeting community.

And then take yourself out dancing, to a club where no one knows you. Stand on the outside of the floor until the lights convince you more and more and the music shows you. 

Dance like no one’s watching because they’re probably not. And if they are, assume it is with best human intentions. The way bodies move genuinely to beats, is after all, gorgeous and affecting. Dance until you’re sweating and beads of perspiration remind you of life’s best things, down your back, like a book of blessings.

Go to the woods alone, and the trees and squirrels will watch for you. 

Go to an unfamiliar city, roam the streets. There are always statues to talk to, and benches made for sitting gives strangers a shared existence if only for a minute. And these moments can be so uplifting and the conversation you get in by sitting alone on benches might have never happened had you not been there by yourself.

Society is afraid of alone though, like lonely hearts are wasting away in basements, like people must have problems if after a while nobody is dating them.

But lonely is a freedom that breathes easy and weightless, and lonely is healing if you make it.

You can stand swathed by groups and mobs or hold hands with your partner, look both further and farther in the endless quest for company.

But no one is in your head. And by the time you translate your thoughts, an essence of them may be lost or perhaps it is just kept. Perhaps in the interest of loving oneself, perhaps all those “sappy slogans” from pre-school over to high school groaning, were tokens for holding the lonely at bay.

Cause if you’re happy in your head, then solitude is blessed, and alone is okay.

It’s okay if no one believes like you. All experience is unique. No one has the same synapses, can’t think like you. For this, be relieved--- keeps things interesting, life’s magic things in reach. And it doesn’t mean you aren’t connected and that community is not present. Just take the perspective you get from being one person in one head and feel the effects of it.

Take silence and respect it.

If you have an art that needs a practice, stop neglecting it. If your family doesn’t get you or a religious sect is not meant for you, don’t obsess about it.

You could be in an instant surrounded if you need it.

If your heart is bleeding, make the best of it.

There is heat in freezing, be a testament.

—Tanya Davis

Good Morning

I haven't been sleeping properly these days. And when I manage, I wake up mercilessly early as if I still needed to get ready for a 7 AM shift.  I miss working. It gives me a sense of being necessary to something.

When have I become this petty? When did my days count on messages that have now started to come in trickles, although I know I really have no right to expect them? No matter how much I tell myself to stop waiting, that I don't have the privilege to be angry when it doesn't come, my eyes refuse to take themselves away from my phone, and I wait like an idiot anyway.

You took this upon yourself. How the fuck do my friends say these things so scathingly and still manage to make me laugh after?

I am not the cool customer who can't cry at the hospital after all. I can't act cold and indifferent. I can only fall apart.

Vodka tastes better diluted, also when you drown your shared disappointments in it about how well you imagined your life would be at this age and what is actually happening now. Maybe we aren't meant to be in relationships. Maybe we'll end up like the three rich old ladies who sat across from our dinner table- unmarried but still friends. And I thought that isn't so bad (but it would be really nice to have children).

Don't worry about tomorrow. God has a way of making things come into place at the right time. Rest in the Mystery. Don't lose sight of reality and its giftedness. You have Christ and the witness of people you love, so why trifle with those minute technological atrocities, about things to come that you're not so sure of? Let it be a mystery. Let it be.

So get up and don't waste the beauty of the morning.

Parking Lots

Today is a Wednesday. The weather outside is fair except for the occasional gushes of wind. The lady who cooks lunch across the street made the bean soup differently; the taste was more pronounced than I would've usually liked.

I sat across a different group of medical students. Whereas yesterday's topic was heart muscles and metacarpals, today they talked about cars and parking lots.

Red faces everywhere. They've been drinking since 1 AM last night until lunchtime today. I found I'm starting to hate the smell of beer.

When emptiness stares at you in the face, you find that you can either fight it with words or silence. I try to make it go away with words, but writing demands solitude so I find myself retreating into silence. In either circumstance I am helpless before the void. I have decided to stop fighting it. Emptiness doesn't have to be antithetical to presence. On the contrary, it invites it. The emptier I feel, the more I desire to be filled. The more I desire Him. This desire sometimes makes me cry when I pray.

I want to go home. I don't want to be here on Valentines. I would rather be with my parents because they are the happiest people in the world, and their love makes me hope that I will have my share of that someday. And I miss my dog.

Ilang Nanay

I've never been the person who gets to travel a lot. Although I would have loved to go places, the best I’ve been to was Baguio City, and I wasn’t even there to have fun riding horses and eating strawberries; I was there for a semi-mandatory convention. I have gone to Bohol as well, but I can’t say I enjoyed it so much because my mom just tagged us along on her seminar and my stepdad wasn’t really the enjoyable type of companion for sightseeing trips. I have been to several beaches and resorts too, but I’m not really much of a beach bum and I don’t like what seawater does to my hair. What I’m really saying is that my list of Memorable Places I’ve Been To is not much of a list yet and frankly, it doesn't really bother me. My best memories have been at home, and no matter how sparkly travel brochures get, there is really only one place I can call my favorite: my great grandmother’s (Nanay’s) house.

It stands at the center of our town, a two-storey home built sometime during the 1930s. It is made of brick and has a brownish color that almost looks red in the sunlight. The first floor is where my great grandmother’s store is located. She used to sell clothes and crayons and guitars, but when my cousins and I were still little kids, the store had been our playground and the items our playthings. Needless to say, most of what she could have sold were either missing some vital parts or completely broken. They eventually stopped selling things that we could break and brought in the nails, the paint, the hinges, and strangely enough, the toilet bowls.

There is a screen door that separates the store from the living room, which is spacious enough for more than twenty people to laugh with each other during family dinners, or for the same number of people to shout at each other during family fights. I remember a time when there was a drought and the whole town lost its supply of water. Everybody was shouting, all twenty of my uncles and aunts, including my grandparents and great grandparents, probably because somebody used up all of the water in the house. There were fingers pointing, voices rising, doors slamming—I had never seen anything so chaotic in my life. But then, when they were not shouting, they usually laughed, talked about business and politics, and teased us children about our crushes. When nobody fought or laughed, everybody cried. That living room had seen four caskets and heard numerous prayers; its walls had echoed the sound of our tears. That living room is where we are a family.

Straight ahead is the kitchen, which has a high ceiling and always smells of paksiw and rice. There is a big and long table at the middle where the adults talk while drinking. Sometimes it is where we children sit, helping ourselves with a hearty meal and a hearty conversation with one another. We even cook there sometimes, although we don’t always come up with something edible. Then there is also that old broken piano inconspicuously sitting at the corner. None of us ever had the luxury of playing it because none of us ever learned how. Nanay and Tatay just bought it because their neighbor had a piano and they just had to have one for themselves.

The stairs that lead to the second floor has a shiny brown banister. As children, we always had fun sliding down on it when the steps looked too many to take.  We would hurt our groins but we would just laugh it away. The second floor has a big window at the center of the first corner wall. It is always open, and its view overlooks the whole town plaza. We used to just squeeze ourselves together against its frames, look below, and make fun of the people who passed by. During New Year's Eve, it is where we watch fireworks. Most nights we would just play cards or Marco Polo until we tire each other out. When it got late and none of us wanted to leave, our parents let us stay, although only after some considerable whining. My grandparents would then take out all the banig, and my cousins and I would huddle together under the covers talking until every one of us fell asleep. In the morning, we would go down and have corned beef and hotdogs for breakfast. On rare occasions, there would be pancakes. It didn’t really matter though what our grandmother made us eat; we enjoyed it all just the same.

Of course, there is the good old backyard where we used to play hide and seek. Our grandfather would scare us from playing by telling us stories of the agta and the duwende. It scared us to bits that until now, none of us dare to stay there for more than five minutes. But then I remember pretty decent memories in that backyard, like when I used to help my grandfather fix his car or feed my uncle’s fighting cocks. Sometimes I got to brush their feathers.

Outside, the house looks exactly like my old great grandmother Nanay Toning who passed away in 2007: worn-out, wrinkly, and tired. Inside, also just like her, Nanay’s house is bursting with energetic laughter and memories. I don’t think I need to be in Paris or Tokyo or any other place to be able to write something wonderful and spectacular. I have a lot of wonderful memories and spectacular moments in that house. I know I will never tire of its familiarity and closeness. In fact, those are what make it so special to me. “Mangadto ta ilang Nanay” will forever be a phrase I will always delight in hearing.

Ocean

It takes an ocean not to break.
But where is it going?
Is it going to end?
Not soon.
Eventually.

Why I Write

I write because I can.

I remember thinking about what I really wanted to do during my teenager-trying-to-find-who-I-am phase. I also remember thinking about the things I was good at, things that people praised me for, things that made me feel good. It wasn't long before I found that small yellowish notebook barely alive with pages. I recognized the scribbles and the doodles; the fat, violent scratches of pencil against fragile paper. I remember that dirty, size-confused penmanship that sometimes stretched to the right, to the left, this time up, then down the next. It was my notebook in kindergarten.

As I flipped through the frail pages of that notebook, I found Cinderella, re-told by my then five-year-old self. I remember not being able to suppress a smile. The grammar was horrible and the spelling was even worse, but it sort of sounded right when I read it. I had been a good writer back then. I'd like to think that I'm still a good writer now. I'd like to think that people aren't just saying I'm good just for the heck of it. I'd like to think that I can write.

I write because I want to.

Very few people are lucky to know, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that one thing they’d love to do for the rest of their lives. Even fewer people are lucky to be allowed to do it. I want to be conceited and say that I am one of those people, lucky enough to know that I want to write and luckier still to be able to.

When I read books, I always want to be able to write like the people who write them. I always think about what adjectives (and how many of them) to put here or which is the right kind of verb. Sometimes I get frustrated about where the period should be, or if it should even be a period at all. Sometimes I think that I can’t write. Worse, sometimes I think that I don’t want to write.

But then I always find myself missing the magical birth of words in paper or in a Microsoft Word page. I miss how they sporadically come out and turn the emptiness of that paper, the blankness of that Word page into something full, something beautiful. I miss the happiness that comes from knowing that those words are mine.

I write because I have to.

Writing makes me aware that I occupy a space in the world. And it is with writing that I hope to make that space significant. I’ve heard one too many people calling me out for such an impractical passion, been asked one too many questions about where and how a currency sign might pop out, seen numerous eyebrows raised, countless foreheads creased, and a haunting number of mouths twisted into a contortion of ridicule and disdain.

I’d thought about it and at one point decided these people made some sense. If I really wanted to save lives, why didn’t I just become a doctor as everybody expected me to be instead of just sitting idly writing about it? But being a doctor isn't the only way to save lives. I’m saving a life when I listen to a friend or when I pray. I know that books and music and poetry save people because they save me every day. I know I save myself when I write. Writing keeps me sane and whole and from forgetting that no matter how bad things get, flowers still grow and there is still so much love to be had.

This is why I write.

I write because I can and I want to and I have to. I write because I know no other way to change the things I want to change. I write because my fingers are restless and because words are too precious to be left alone in an axis where they don’t mean anything and can’t touch lives. I write because I am in love, because I am sad, because I am angry, because I am happy. I write because people think I’m good at it and because I sometimes lead myself to believe I’m good at it. I write because I suck at everything else. I write because I am conceited and get jealous of other writers who are better than me. I write because it makes me feel good. I write because I want to tell the truth that I believe. I write because I’m a coward. I write because it gives me courage. I write because the world needs to wake up. I write because people need me to tell their stories and because I need people to hear my stories. I write because I have dreams. I write because I hope. I write because I’m alive. I write because I want to be alive.