How do I keep writing? How do I keep living? There may be a reason. I do not know which one since the reasons keep coming and going. No writer writes for one reason alone. He keeps writing until he can hang onto something else, and time passes. People live for different things in different years, too. No one lives for one reason. The reasons will continually change. It is the living that continues. It is the writing that goes on.
I have lived to wait for certain happiness and written to pass the time. When the wait was over, I got a desk and put it in the space created inadvertently in the corner of the room. I began writing. There was a semblance of happiness in all this, albeit not the one I had waited for. It seemed like the only good use for the corner of my heart. I have written every day since. Many live to forget and write to imagine things that never happened—as a proxy, overwriting what happened. They highlight the good, inflate it and make it larger; they forget to capture the elementary detail about the bad or omit it entirely.
Perhaps, the better questions are: why do you write now, at this moment, and why do you keep living? I believe it is a question I have asked myself one too many times recently. It is a question I have asked many others as well. Take the last evening: I sat sharing a stack of banana pancakes with a friend on a Monday evening, and with my mouth stuffed, I asked him, “Well, you know how it always is; what do I do now that I am happy?” He said nothing, but the answer was right there.
You live. You continue getting delectable pancakes with your friends, you look at the rain and wait for it ardently, and when it arrives, you scurry back into the house in an irony nature does not quite understand. You continue laughing and, if life demands, crying. There always has been so much more than our collective pursuit of individual happiness. You go through the motions, contribute to the world, and see what time has in store.
Sometimes, if you’re like me with a desk in the corner, you must sit down and write about everything. I write because I don’t know any other way to live; I live because what else is there to do anyway?