[Written on an internetless device last night, at 00:30]
Walking home from the tube through the rain, yellow and brown leaves covering the path, I got to thinking about writing. How I’ve acquired this habit over the years – the years of dreams of becoming a writer. My thoughts aren’t always just a flow of words and feelings, a stream in constant movement. I often turn my musings into sentences, formulating a text in my head. Trying to turn a messy mind into something readable. I fall for elegant combinations of words, I get excited.
But this habit, it creates problems too. I get lost in my own sentences, I get stuck, I make myself restless. It causes sleeplessness, it can make me distraught, and it has definitely greatly increased my natural talent for excentricity.
Writing the sentences down, actually seeing them in black against white, releases me. It allows me to move on. When the words are out there, there’s no reason to dwell on them anymore. The dream created a habit, which developed a need in me. I need to write. Otherwise, I risk losing myself in my own mind.
I haven’t had time to write for quite a while. Not properly at all, really, since summer. I lost myself in thesis stress and the drama that is inevitable when the relationships that one has is with other humans. I completely forgot how writing can focus my thoughts, help me make out the important from the irrelevant or superfluous. I need to remember to write when I’m in Burkina Faso. I cannot afford to lose my mind in a foreign country.
This is what I was thinking of, while walking home through the rain. The sweet smell of rotting leaves and wet asphalt in the air, I was listening to Ed Harcourt and Feist. Favorite music from an earlier me, a time when I didn’t know what I wanted to do, but I knew I was going places. Now, at least I think I know what I want to do. I just don’t know if I’m capable of getting there.
Fourty minutes ago, it was Josh’s birthday. That was what I was walking home from, though the rain. I might only have a vague idea of what I’m doing, but my haphazard search for it has at least led me to some pretty amazing people. And I guess that’s all that matters, in the end, anyway.
Katja Malmborg 