On most days, I hated reading anything I had written before. I’d read something I wrote years ago and I’d get this feeling of detachment. As if I hadn’t written it in the first place. As if it was a vague memory that I could remember the presence of but not its details.
It stood there, like smudged marks of graphite that said something important once upon a time but are now reduced to a blur. If you looked closely, you’d see the lines etched on the paper, provided you were lucky it left a recognisable mark. Otherwise, it was lost.
I regretted sharing everything, in hindsight. Once a word was out, it wasn’t my own. It was yours. It was your neighbour’s. It belonged to your friend. Your sibling played with it, aimlessly. It was everyone’s and it was out. It was a part of my life handed into countless hands by myself.
So, no matter how much I wanted it to be the case, on some days with some words, I often wished I’d never written them. Some things should’ve been my own. You should’ve never known of them. Of course, I can’t take the words back. They were out there, forever. That was writing.
Although, I wonder if memories aged better if they were behind windows of glass or fences of metal—visible yet out of reach. I wonder if you could record them like that, keeping some parts of them with yourself, forever, never to be shared, and yet, spilling everything else.
I wonder if it was possible to write like that—without telling everyone everything. I wonder if I would ever figure it out. I’ll have to keep going as I have been—giving it all away—until I do.
Tell me, what do you make of irony?