Life.
Life.
Odd how life keeps continuing, despite what may happen at any individual point. Never would I have guessed how my life would end up had one taken the time to ask me about my thoughts of the future way back when I was still in grade school. Life is such a difficult thing to anticipate.
I'm taking a creative nonfiction class this semester at college, so I apologize if that style of writing starts to creep into this "weekly" column. Somehow I feel my writing has no real direction... I say I want to inform an audience in a readable way, yet none of my articles come close to doing that. Honestly, I just don't know about myself. My writing is terrible, though obviously from my word choices and stylistic attitudes, it is at least clear that I am a moderately competent reader. It's quite sad really. Having decided to start Panangelium.tk and subsequently bringing together a couple of writers that I have always felt are far superior to me in style, I am saddened by the fact that my own irresponsibility has caused my writing here to not only come out sporadically, but in such a very poor manner that sometimes I am too ashamed to even send it in to the editor that I myself appointed. It's really a quite depressing thought.
I think what I lack most is not a sense of rigor, though of course I am severely lacking in that respect, but instead I write without passion. Even when I truly care about a topic, I do not insert my feelings into the text, and in place of readable essays, I produce harsh-sounding stutter-inducing crap that looks like it was written for the front page of some backwater high school newspaper.
Life continues.
Stuff keeps happening to me. In the past, it was always a matter of my constantly hurting others, all the way up until I started college some three years ago. Even then, my overly violent nature could still occasionally be seen, as evidenced by one of my college friends, who pissed me off so badly one day in freshman year that I literally punched through a window. Believe me when I say that it isn't as easy as it looks in movies.
But in the past three years, it has not so much been the usual story of my life in which I hurt everyone who has ever dared to become close to me (even P, on multiple occasions, for which I feel especially terrible), but rather it is I who have been hurt, time and time again. Sometimes by the jocular voices of friends, and other times by the cruel stares of strangers. I realize it shouldn't hurt, and honestly, I am the one who is intentionally causing such events to occur, but nonetheless I am bound by the feelings that lie deep inside of me, feelings that I never let through to the surface except very occasionally, like with Mary or Jennifer or Stephanie or...Robin.
I do not (nor should not) expect you, the reader to understand any of what I am saying. This is not a personal journal, though it is a memoir of my ideas, and this is not the place for heart-felt confessions, though this is where I wish to reach out and touch my readers as closely as I can. In the end, I am but a man: stupid, rash, and utterly naïve. And as such, you, the reader I so desperately wish to speak to, will likely have no desire (nor even the slightest inclination) to read what few words I write here. Nonetheless, I write.
Life.
I write because I live. In living, I must communicate; but it is so rare that I find the ability to get across my feelings or ideas, and it is even less often that I am able to get across both of them. So I write. I write so that maybe, just maybe, my words might reach the eyes of a few. Likely I will never meet those few. In fact, I doubt to ever even know those few. But I write anyway.
I write because I hurt. Have you ever hurt so much? So much that something had to be done, yet there was nothing to be done? For me, it meant I had to break down and talk to Jennifer in Delaware. It meant I had to hold back my tears in Florida, even though Mary did all she could to make me feel comfortable enough to talk to her. It meant that here, in Alabama, I am pursuing thoughts, ideas, and patterns of life that I have not had glimpses of for literally years.
I write because I want to be a writer. Not that I will ever become one. But what a life it would be.... This website engulfs me—it tears me apart on the inside—just because it gives me space to write how I feel, to reach out to an audience that likely does not even read my scant words, to slump awkwardly, unable to cope with the idea that my words are falling into the endless gulf of the internet, never to be read by any other soul.
I write because some things are worthy of attention, even if I am not the one to ever get across such concepts. Fiction is great—really, it is—but my heart is simply no longer in it. I cannot deal with it. I can barely read it. I am hooked on reality. On finding out what is real. Like me. Like these very words, or, to be more precise, like these concepts that these words are attempting to signify. This is reality. This is me, whether you like it or not. I may not be a writer, but writer or not, I am still real. I am me.
I write because I am me. I am a writer. I am alive. I am hurt. I am worthy of attention. I am real.
"I write as though I am whispering in the ear of the one I love."
And life goes on.
