What do you do when the catharsis of writing becomes your addiction? Well, you can make a career out of it. That’s one way. But how does one come around to writing their way into their own deliverance? Why run with such a basic skill?
Because at the moment I am free. Not banned or censored. Unlike other writers in other countries trying to do the same thing I am, I can document history in my own voice. We’re no longer a “fengcheng,” or Chinese for sealed city, but that has done little to quell the chaos. Outside people are still passionate or incensed in some cases. I can tell people’s stories.
Yesterday I sat, well more like hunched, in an old wooden chair with my legs twisted underneath a laptop and nothing but relative quiet for company. Every few hours a cup of ginger ale or the gift of a fried fish sandwich appeared. I barely noticed the person attached, but I tried to remember to look up and smile at least.
I know I disappeared into my own head though almost immediately after, words sprinting through at breakneck speed, rearranging and shuffling back and forth like a game of chess. I want to say that I think this is bad but I don’t. I spent a lot of my childhood this way. A stiff barrier between me and whatever I wasn’t engrossed in thinking or writing about.
“You don’t just think deeply, you excavate,” a friend would say. That was the running joke. I’m quiet because inside is loud as hell and I’m trying to accomplish something right now.
Tapping into a reservoir of empathy or scrutiny. Remembering some obscure detail in a story. What did that sound like? What’s a synonym for what that sounded like? Is that relevant to what they meant though? What’s that sound?
Oh, it’s raining. And night. And the incessant low-frequency clanging coming from the radiators is probably the heat kicking up for the first time this fall. Where’d the day go? I ate something right? I moved today, right?
At that halting thought, I figured it’s time to take a break. I surveyed my space; which is now dark with cups and empty bowls and plates all over the nearby bed that I tend to use as a desk because my actual desk has unfinished paintings stacked on it.
I cleaned a little half-heartedly, watching the pouring rain through the bars on the windows. I turned on a desk light. I stretched and walked around the blessedly empty-at-the-moment apartment. I eyed the walls and held a hand up to feel the cool, hard brick behind them, just to remind myself how old this house is.
Towards the front neighbors are laughing, talking about the lawn or something. I could hear them up on the porch. When I was little I’d wake up sometimes, just after what felt like sunrise, to find my grandma nestled on the upstairs porch. Just sitting. Sometimes grandpa would be up cooking already. Sometimes he’d be sitting beside her. I get it now, why they used to sit and watch so much from the porch. Their own island and shore. I don’t go up there to write as often as I did as a kid. It’s kind of lost some of the magic since the grands fled to the south and made a home in Florida. I like to think I’ve used my inherited quiet from them well, though.
