I severely lacked imagination. I watched people think of unicorns and rainbows and all things bright and beautiful. I watched them all the time talking about what could be, but I could only see what was; I was too grounded. It was a problem for me because that meant, I couldn’t write about things I had never felt or seen, and that didn’t sit right by me. I could only write about what I knew. To that effect, I was terribly limited.
My writing was art, maybe. At least, I’d like to think so as I clacked keys at three in the PM or AM; that is, to say, regardless of the time. However, my writing was never going to be my largest piece, my greatest achievement. My magnum opus was not going to be a few words or sentences strung together. At some point, I realised, my stupendous masterpiece was going to be my life.
It would be all that I tried on my journey to more: to know more, to feel more, to be more. It was going to be in how I lived and how I loved. It would be in the anecdotes, if people had any to offer, after I had ceased to be. My life was my magnum opus. My pièce de résistance was in my everyday. I hoped that someday, when someone pulled on that thread, they’d stumble upon my irrelevant life and it would humour them for a wee minute. That was my last act.
My act of writing was only to keep a faithful record of it, in my own way, to not muddy the truth of it all. So, like a madman, I connected tiny details, left little hints littered through time itself. It all began on the day I was born, or rather, the day I seized control of how I wanted to go further. I was going to work on it, in my own time, until the day I died. Until then, I had to keep going.
What else could someone with a limited imagination do? I agree, it was a poor man’s solution. Yet, it was enough for me to find meaning amidst the futility of it all. I was my own work of art, and I was my own unfinished feat. On most days, however, I was my own unreliable narrator, tricking myself into believing I had anything to offer.
Or that, I had anything significant to say.