Writing Comes Easy

Divyanshu

I don’t know what to write. But I’m writing. Here is another sentence. And another. It can go on for a while and I might fail to make any sense if I’m not paying attention. It’s quite strange because words always have meaning in themselves. Letters don’t. Letters come together and create images. A for apple. B for boy. It has to be in a certain order. Random letters are just . . . random. And so are random words. They need to be in a particular order, and suddenly, they are more than just words. They have texture, they have taste, they have life. They are nouns and adjectives and verbs. They are people, they are happy, they are running. When you put in one word after another, you’ve to be very careful. Like Frankenstein’s monster . . . You’re using different body parts. The head should go on the top, then the neck, then torso and so on. The important part is that you’ve to be very careful about the size of the head and the neck.

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The legs should be of equal length otherwise the monster wouldn’t walk. Your phrases won’t work if you’re lacking rhythm or meter. Not the musical kind, but the simple motion and friction of life and living.

But still writing is simple. Except when it’s not. The days when it doesn’t come that easy. There are times when you’ve to actually make effort to put one word after the other because when you go to the graveyard to collect the body parts, they might not always match. Or sometimes, you’ve to go to a different cemetery. A new place gives you the feeling of being lost. But that’s what writing is about. Being lost. You write to lose yourself. To escape. To move out. To get somewhere. But it has to be somewhere new because you can’t be lost in your own house.

. . . Can you?

You can lose something in your own house – pen, keys, earphones, a piece of paper where you jotted an important number. Ideas. You can also lose ideas in your house. It happens.

The days when you wake up with the creative energy bubbling inside you, tormenting your soul like a desperate lover, luring you to create something. And yet, you feel hollow as if you’ve lost parts of yours somewhere between the journey from sleep to consciousness. Then you start to look for the ideas that you had once noticed scurrying around the corners of your room like nimble rats, but didn’t pay attention to them because you thought they’d stick around. You look for them on your desk and under it. You turn over your pillow and check the drawers in the kitchen.

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Most of the time you fail. Sometimes you don’t.

Oh, those lucky few times when you catch the words from the air like annoying flies and smash them down on the keyboard . . . tap, tap, tap . . . crush them and juice them, and travel down into that magical hole to the realm of imagination. The lucky times when you aren’t busy writing about how you can’t write and how the blank page stares back at you like a mortal enemy with the clicking of the clock on the wall to fill in the silence. Do you feel that bastard staring at you as if it would strip you naked and beat the life from your body one blow at a time? Not on those lucky days, though, when you can cross these dark alleys without having to look back over your shoulder after every three steps. You just sit down, take a deep breath like you take in the fresh air before marching down on an adventure and then go at it. Pick your backpack and get going. Putting down words, one. After. The other. And that’s how you start a journey.