When the ink dries up
Sometimes I look back on all I’ve written here on this Daily Dose section and I wonder how the heck did I do it all. I’m not amazed by it, though. How could I be? With lifeless asyndetons, hasty word choices, and jokes that are almost as bad as a clown at a funeral, I often felt that my thoughts were unoriginal and trite. Topics cycled, my ideas were poor and misshapen, and whatever I was writing probably wasn’t worth the page that held it.
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I could have been doing other things instead of sifting through sentences that ignited like a wet match. I could have not wasted the ink. The energy of typing could be put to better use. And I could have been outside, could have been laughing, and could have at least saved my eyes from the eventual screen-induced myopia.
But despite such mass production of words that may be hardly worth mass-producing in the first place, I am still writing this – everything above and everything below.
This persistence against all other opposition is important. Though my determination may just be the sign of prolific-amateur who is hunting for the right words to describe a world that shifts as he pens it down and so he goes searching again, I like to believe that even if this is meaningless, it is worth something to me. Not because it inherently is, but because I can make it so by slugging on day by day by day.
Sure, it’s draining. Yes, it’s thankless. And more often than not, I wonder why I’m still here, still looking into the screen, then the ceiling, then a boy in front of me with coiffed hair, a knitted sweater, and shoes that’ll leave his toes cold. Then I wiggle my own toes, feel the warmth in my socks. Then I write, erase, and write again.
Why?
Because in doing what I have to do, and in doing what I want to do, and in trying to find the line between the two, I have lost the ink in my pen, tattered the pages of my journal, and ruined my fingers with uneven callous that now tickles my tips as I type. I’d rather have this – the weariness and exhaustion, the bluntness and the fumbling around with sentences like wine-corks in my mouth – than the alternative of a pen clothed, a paper unwrinkled, and a finger where even the slightest mark seems foreign. I’d rather do, act, and feel with vulgar inaccuracy than sit here, cross my arms, and wait for the world to wake up when I do.
That does not mean I should write, of course. But even if I shouldn’t and if I have worn down these words, diluted my paragraphs, and filled an entire page with nonsense, it is better to trudge and to struggle with what to say, knowing that you tried to say something in the first place, then to say nothing at all.
I have much to say still. Rested after Reading Week, I have stories to tell, opinions that should be voiced, and experiences that need to be highlighted, criticized, and laughed about. I don’t know what they are yet exactly, but I’ll write until I find them in between the infinite spaces between this word and the last.
