katfireblade

The question has been in my head a lot, why I dont write anymore. Once, to me, writing was like breathing. It was life. I didnt write because I necessicarily liked too, but because I was compelled too. Anyone who has kept up with this prolific journal for any amount of time can certainly see where that might be true. And, again, dont get me wrong, I also didnt stop because I didnt enjoy it, in fact most of the time I did. The buzz I could get off a writing jag was better than sleep, often better than sex, and if interrupted or at a stuck point, I'd find myself pacing restlessly, so full of energy I'd be unable to sit still. If interrupted I became one of two things, very very cranky or so horny I couldnt see straight. There were benefits and drawbacks to both.



I even remember when my writing, for the main part, died. I had been coming to dead ends for a while, unable to move forward on anything, and more and more life was getting in thew way. Also, in a large part, I was letting it. Once I crafted in my writing the lives I hoped to live, the places I would never see. I lived my childhood trapped in ways that could give people nightmares, and writing was my wings and my hope. When I found myself unaccountably freed from my cage with the ability to fly, however faltering it might be, I took it. I grabbed it with both hands and rode it hard, as consumed by actual living as once I had been by the worlds and lives that only I could see. And for a little bit even I could admit that the reason I didnt write about life was because I was too busy living it, and while that worried me a bit, I still found time to write, still faltered my way through my worlds, and still guarded my precious writings with my life.

Then came the day that Chet, Chuck, Art, Amber and I were all living in the tent. The computer was there, the dorm fridge, other things Art and the guys couldnt live without. It was the summer we had nowhere to go but to live in a tent in the campgrounds on the Cherokee reservation, all five us us plus four dogs and three cats. Amber might have already been pregnant, I dont recall, and by the end of the summer I was too. It was approximately a year and a half after that Chet and I stopped dating, approximately a year that he finally hit me the first time. Give or take a month or three. I could tell you what happened and in what order, but not exact dates. During that summer we battled flood, trees falling on the tents, pregnancy, poverty, and one night I wound up in the hospital where people were honestly afraid I was fatally sick. It was...eventful.

I remember the flood bottoming out our tent. There was silt and water everywhere, and sacattered across the floor in the midst of it all was every disk of all the stories I had created but never printed out. Disk after disk, there must have been dozens. Hard work, hours and days and weeks of it, carefully crafted places and lives, blood sweat and tears on my part. Tears on my part is literal, I cannot write without feeling. I laugh, I cry, I get horny, angry, feral, afraid. I can write myself into pain, paranoia, love, and regret. And when I stop, it can stay with me for hours. I dont think everyone does that, I dont know where it comes from, or why, but there you have it. And there it was, the lives and worlds and thoughts and feelings I had fiercely loved, being trod on by uncaring feet and wiped out by silt and water. And I remember looking at those disks, my disks, and being completely numb. I just stared at them on the floor, the disks that never left my side, that were babied as much as my cats and (later) my son, and feeling...nothing. And I left them there, and never thought on them or touched them again.

Nor did I ever write again quite the way I had before. If anything, I shied away from the all consuming emotions, found other outlets for the compulsion, and despite whacking away at it almost through habit more than desire, died to it bit by bit.

I've been writing since I was old enough to hold a pen. At eight years old I would write until my hand cramped. I would hate it, I hated all things literary as a kid except for reading, and yet time and again I would write the adventures spilling out of my brain onto paper until the sun had set and I couldnt move my fingers, hating every blessed moment of it. It wasnt creativity, it wasnt choice. I bled my soul onto paper and then buried it in files away from the eyes of anyone who'd ever so much as look at it, then go back and do it again. I carried a notebook and the name of "geek" everywhere, and when some girls cruelly hid my backpack, I cried first for that notebook and second for schoolbooks and lunch money. They could have it all, but not my notebook, just leave me that.

About the time I lost Kevin and Jess, I also finally became honest with myself. I needed too, probably had needed to be for a long, long time. I was no writer, a writer has stories to get on paper, a writer--even a bad one--hopes to get published someday, or at least heard. A writer has things to say, ideas that cant be held back, falls in love with the characters in their minds. A writer as I had always defined myself doesnt just write, they bleed ectoplasmic junk onto notebook paper until even their body cant keep up with the desire, until they just physically...stop. Its sleep or its food, and maybe its been three hours or three days, but they just cant go on anymore until the body revives. Its a marathon race to see who wins, the compulsion or the body, and if you never win, you also never lose. And there I was, scratching out some bare, dry pen scratches and spending the chunks of time where I would once have been consumed in an agony of intellectual silence. The faces and people who once had come to me to tell their stories had gone elsewhere, and all I had left of my compusion and desire was an echoing emptiness inside my brain.

Trouble was, I didnt know why.

Upon being honest with myself, I am always honest with those around me. Someone asked me about it, not too long after that while I was still figuring it all out myself, and I answered him as I have answered everyone since, "No, I am not a writer." Maybe I even tried to explain to him why, I dont recall. I know I didnt go as in depth as all this, I wouldnt have. It didnt seem the most important thing at the time, and I--wrongly--believed that we had more time, maybe all the time in the world. As we got to know each other I could fully explain, and I intended too. Seeing the dissapointment in his eyes, almost crestfallen, feeling that I had somehow failed a test with him that echoed what I felt was failing in myself has haunted me from that day to this. It funny what eats at you sometimes.

Perhaps I wouldnt have felt it as strongly, but even to me it felt like I was drowning in some way, begging for someone to just throw me a rope, and on more issues than simply if I could write. I suppose I was simply searching for an understanding ear, someone I could hang out with, someone to be a friend. A pal. Nothing has changed, I am still drowning and still begging, the difference being is that now I dont expect my screams to be heard, and wouldnt trust the rope if it was tied to me. You live and learn, I guess.

I do remember what finally caught my attention enough to rexamine something I thought I had resolved and released the moment I said out loud for the very first time that no, I was not a writer. It was a feeling, something I had been missing so long I had become used to the loss and no longer even realized was gone. It felt like waking up, like after a long time of being asleep and silent and all alone, there was something finally worth waking up too. I wanted to craft things with my hands. I wanted to make things of surpassing beauty that would touch hearts. I wanted to share things I had until then jealously guarded. And most of all, suddenly, out of nowhere, I wanted to write. And not just a little bit, but with the passionate intensity I recalled from childhood, with the grip and compulsion I had given up forever for lost. And it was...incredible. It was like breathing for the first time, and never even having relaized how long I had sat, holding my breath.

I suppose some would have called it love, and it wasnt that that emotion was lacking. The thing is, I felt it would have happened even if love never had, even if that emotion had died stillborn, leaving nothing in its wake but the affection of friendship, or even the agression of intellectual combat. I said often that he was special to me, that I wanted him around even as a friend, and meant every word. Somehow just by being himself, he stirred me up, made me think, awoke things in me that had been sleeping or even dead for almost as long as I could remember, and it was something I felt would have happened no matter what, that the chemistry we got off one another went way beyond anything that had happened or could ever potentially happen in a bedroom.

I learned only later that this also wasnt true, that if anything had ever been felt, it was likely all on my side alone, that anything done towards me had been at best a very light affection--maybe like the kind you'd give a dog--and at absolute worst out of a sense of pity, but that was it. Whatever test makes it or breaks it I had failed right from the start, and any friendship, any chemistry, anything at all from tha point on was all in my deluded little head or only on my end, and the only reason he never said so to me aloud was because of some misguided politeness, or well-meaning but dead wrong belief that finding out through other channels beside him would be a "gentler" way to let me down. It wasnt. Instead it hurt me so badly it nearly broke me, and left in its ashes was that rekindled spark.

And again, from that questions. If it wasnt love that did it, what was it? Was it simply being stirred around by someone new, new ideas, new places, the vast changes my life took at that time? Except that vast changes are almost commonplace for me, sometimes tediously so, and they have at times brought that spark, but not always, and in no lasting manner. Could it be that I had been so ready for a change, any change, and had actually fooled myself into thinking that I had found a place and people friendly and safe enough to start making those changes a reality? Was it the safety this time, the certainty? Well, perhaps. But if so, why did nothing come of the rather dangerous adventure I put myself through in New York, seeking the exact sort of changes I had once thought could be found here? Was it because, in the end, no real change happened and I was left drowning again? Will I have to keep pushing the limits until I break, and only at that point something will finally flow? It seems to be a very "artist" thing to do, come to think of it, destroying yourself. They are uncounted, how many pushed the edges until they went mad or died, and for the first time in my life I can honestly say I think I know how they must have felt. But the answer to that is, I really dont know. I dont know how Arasina got out of it either, that was one big place where I got stuck with her, was how to bring back the dying.

I asked a lot more questions, but I hit the big ones.

I know it sometimes seems these little entries fall from my fingers as if I plowed through them with hours upon hours of hard work and maybe even a re-write or two. Not really, my re-writes are much more coherant, less stream of conciousness, and spell-checked. And I really should make more of my political posts that way. As a matter of fact, these only seem coherant because I make these entries the same way I learn music--without my knowing it. The evnts that spurred the questions happened as much as almost a full year ago, and I've been thinking about off and on (keep in mind, misery is a funny fellow, he takes all your attention and leaves you with nothing but ashes, and he took all of mine for a long while, else this post may have been made much sooner) for almost that long. This has especially snapped my heels with my "full attention"--that is, I actually conciously thought about it as often as unconciously--for almost a month. They write themselves in the back of my head, ideas forming and fitting together, the whys and wherefores meshing until they become their own whole. There comes a point of--and there is no other word for it--compulsion, and at that point, fully formed, fully finished or not, I have to let it drop to paper like overripened fruit from the vine. And that time has finally come.

Of all the questions I asked, I had only one answer I couldnt shake....appriciation. He was so good at always saying the right thing at the right times that I fell into believeing whole-heartedly that after so long of being forced to fit people's ideas of me, of being molded into idol, goddess, monster, freak and whore to fit so many people's agendas, that finally I was speaking to someone who looked at me and, very simply, saw me. The person. Just Kat, nothing more, nothing less. The relief was incredible, it was akin to what Atlas would feel if the gods finally removed the world from his shoulders. And that he liked me, just me, warts and all...well, what ridiculous adjective do you want? We all know how we feel when we find someone we click with, someone who makes us feel comfortable and important and wanted, who looks and sees us, who listens and hears us, not some preconceived bullshit of their own. Insert you own adjectives, I dont see a need to. It was hard enough to admit my own stupidity the first time around, thanks, and I'm still more than a little bit raw about being the stupidest, most nieve chick on the block, and the only one who honestly couldnt figure out a polite lie when it was bitch-slapping her into next week. I didnt even catch those kindly, polite lies when I finally found out he thought I was a psycho, a belief that, despite my best efforts, I dont think he ever stopped having.

Whatever.

*shrug* I cant explain that lack, not in an otherwise bright girl like me. Maybe I was just at a point where I desperately needed acceptance, more than love, more than lifemates, more than anything. It wasnt his job to give it or my place to ask it, though in my own defense I never would have if I'd for a second understood what was really going on. I spent a lot of that time period very confused. Or maybe I really was that nieve, a sin I know I will never be guilty of again. By the end of it I think I finally understood why so many people have given up on humanity and think them a cruel and capricious lot, something I honestly never really understood before despite being the butt of some of the worst of it. Certainly not with this amount of personalized clarity. Of course, I also havent ruled out just simple self torture; finding delight in making myself miserable. Or it could have been all of the above, you never know.

But thinking about it from the situation as I cloudily understood it then, at that time that acceptance made me want...more. It reminded me, however briefly, what I hoped to find out of life, who I wanted to become, where I wanted to be, how I wanted to live. It made me want to strive, to...I guess, silly as it sounds in retrospect, to somehow earn the respect I had thought I was already receiving. I dont know if anyone else would quite get what I was talking about, its like that mentor or close friend who has faith in you, and you feel it, and their faith spurs your own in yourself and you find yourself trying to acheive ten impossible things before breakfast because suddenly you have two people you want to make proud, you and them, when before you didnt even care if you did well for yourself. Like I said, it was like breathing again, for the first time in a very long time.

Maybe I really was just that starved for attention, it has been longer than I can recall since someone took such a personal interest in me even for a short period of time, and ultimately I never expected such a personal interest to last forever, but wanted to enjoy it fully while it did. Of course, this is not to be confused with the many close friends who do have an interest in me, but always have other things which do--and should--call their attention first--ya know, like kids n such. Mostly, people like to try and forget I exist, even--or especially--when I am being exactly what they want me to be, quiet, unobtrusive, and a complete lack of trouble. This is what I'm used to. Receiving the opposite was novel. And sadly addictive.

Of course it was important to me, so of course I screwed it all up. I frequently do when its important to me; if I cared less I'd be less prone to second guess myself and make mistakes. I suppose as back-handed compliments go, I could have delivered worse.

But thinking about that situation and what might have spurred me called to mind when I had done my best writing. It had always been with a freind or appriciative boyfriend or even a writer's group mulling over what I was prepared to allow them to see, giving feedback, and really seeing the story rather than just reading it for visceral thrills or a good laugh. Like I said, what I'd allow them to see.

Much of my writing has never seen the light of day, something I expect is ultimately true with all writers, or even all artists. They say the grand masters would paint over what we now consider masterpieces because they just werent satisfied. Perfection is the curse of the idealistic. Every artist has the mind of a god and the hands of a mortal, and I have long come to believe that greatness is never acheived in the final product, but in the constant striving for perfection that shapes us with the sharp urgency of a chisel molding stone. But I suppose even God wasnt content with creating his materpiece, but had to create a race of people simply to appriciate the beauty of what he had done. What can I say, if every artist is egotistical, it might be because they, over all, were made in the most perfect image of God. And anyone who considers God a meek divinity hasnt read their bible.

Another thng that also spurred this whole train of thought almost to a wrecking place was Home. During my session I found myself there again, in a way I hadnt done pilgramage in almost...oh gods, is it really over ten years now? Coming out the other side I was energized in a way I hadnt been in a very long time.

Immediatly afterwords saw Her again in my mind, the young thief with a cheetah for a companion, the dark wizard that might be salvation, death, or both to her, and the desert climate they found themselves in. I have almost decided by the foliage I see arounf them and what I know of the climate it must be in a similar place to Africa, if not in people and culture, than in terrain. Certainly a crossroads of culture, for there seems to be no lack of odd people springing from the woodwork, most of which I know came there but werent born there. And now a blind young miss who was abandoned by her father but doesnt yet know it. There are likely others, but I have so many more questions to ask before I can begin her tale again. I think about it now, on long drives or in times of idleness, where I used to think on other things. Its a nice habit to return too, I took life much less seriously when I had more than one I was juggling.

They are in my mind too, They and their pink "demoness." I am fascinated by a people who would come together out of need but never out of conformity, and to whom individuality is life's breath in such a way that if you caged them or stripped them of it, they'd die. I am more fascinated by how someone who comes from a culture like our modern day one, where individuality is supressed or outright discouraged, where freedom is a concept more than a lifestyle, and who only knows derision for trying to both would view such a society, or how she might in a place and time where quite literally anything goes, but where also, if you are careless or irresponsible, anything could also get you killed. Especially when people so badly want her dead. I am fascinated, but also stumped. Its growing in me that they have something to say, but I dont know what it is just yet.

And perhaps thats the final piece to my puzzle, even to why appriciation meant so much when, by all rights, it shouldnt have. Its not just being listened too, but having something to say. Its not enough for me to simply write another soap opera love story and re-explore the tangled relationships a thousand others before me have. It isnt enough to simply tread on yet another world with two suns or a black moon that has creatures of surpassing strangeness, just like a million other books in print have. It isnt enough, even, simply to be published and make a buck at what I do. In doing so, I have to feel the power of it, feel the punch, I have to feel that there is something in there worth bringing to others. Maybe its a moral or deep thoughts, maybe its adrenaline from a fast-paced head rush, maybe its just a cheap laugh. But whatever it is, it isnt enough for me to write it or even others to read it. There has to be something to say. Otherwise the words are just garbage, messing up the airwaves.

Someone once told me to tell them a story, that they liked stories, and I told them one I tell few people, thinking again; "Next time, next time I'll tell them one of my better ones." One that was put together, one that I spent hours writing, one that has a beginning and an end. Next time. Next time, again thinking I'd have the chance, that I had all the time in the world. I will always regret that particular loss, its one I still feel when many others have faded. And it wasnt just what was said, but the intimacy it was said in, almost as if they were demanding at the same time both a gift and a right, with no thoughts as to whether or not I could tell a good story, with no question in their mind; I could and I would. Of all the things in all the world someone could have ever said to me, those rate among the most magical words I have ever heard. Probably even above "I love you."

As I said before, its funny, those things that stick with you.

Slowly, after years of silence, after feeling barren and bereft, even dead in ways I dont think I could explain to people who have never felt the urge to create, these things are growing in my mind. So again are the colors and shapes of worlds I thought I had left behind forever, and the faces and forms of people that had vanished. I can smell the still, dusty air, hear the criers in the bazaar. I can feel the brewing of a storm across the palins and feel the moisture in the air. Almost like a whispering, stories are being told again, unfolding like books I'm only now in the process of beginning.

Will it stay? I dont know. Can you predict the health of a soul, if it will flourish or die? I have bled enough recently to nourish any soil, and moved to a new place to find a newer, better sun to shine on me. Despite a sometimes curse of omens, I very rarely know where I am going, and in this case I'm not even looking. I simply dont want to know. But I do want my gloved little thief down on paper, I want to know how in hells she got entangled with a magic user when she normally avoids them with a superstition akin to fanatical paranoia, and what possible use he could find in her outside of a quick fuck. Thus far I have found nothing so powerful that the two would be bound together, but for whatever reason he wont leave her alone. What does the penniless and powerless have that he would want? And it haunts me, where before it just irked me. Its the treasure hunt, this has reason, but what it is I dont yet know. And I'm shaking with the need to find out.

I think this might just be a good sign.
No promises, not even to myself, I dont need any more broken promises to myself.
But yes, cautiously, I kind of believe this could be a good sign.

Bedtime calls, and my thief must run through my dreams for a while. I dont know if I answered a blessed thing with all this, but I feel...better. More--stable isnt the right word, more like the phrase "ducks in a row." Like I dropped things into slots they belonged in or did a little housecleaning. I have no end to this because there is no end, I havent even worked through thinking of it all yet. And it feels weird, I finish things, I have no practice with the open ended.

But maybe its good, maybe its exactly what I need---*