In upper kindergarten, if my memory remembers the room right, I wrote the first set of words I have ever written: a reiteration of a standard run-of-the-mill fable. With a small notebook and a pencil in my even smaller hands, I wrote it all down; transcribing would be a more appropriate word now for I was simply writing what I remembered. The grammar must have been shoddy, and the handwriting illegible, but I completed it, and I filled pages, and then I showed it to everyone, and I remember the notebook went with us as we went to visit relatives the following weeks and it was shown to everyone, and there was applause, and that was when I knew I was going to do it forever. Not for the applause, no, but to remember.
Perhaps it was because I knew about my forgetfulness even then, of how easily I forget my days. Or maybe the cloak of meaning on this memory is the bias of two decades having passed in the meantime, and maybe, at the moment, it was but the whims of a child and nothing else.
Since then, I have written. I have written to remember, and sometimes, I have written to forget, and the fallacy of the latter is not washed over me. And when applause came, in how it came—loud or soft, little or large—it was a welcome sight. But by no means was it something I sought; there always has been a greater meaning to it all. But now, I have become disillusioned with this practice. Most of it is the tribulation and general air of life, of things you hear and see or things that happen to you—good or bad. A giant elephant sits in the middle of this room as I write these words down.
The truth is that what I write, how I carry this activity, and what I say or leave out do not fit in a neat box, and the world has, if not always, surely now, been about demarcation. Among all that I have felt these past few months, I have felt this strongly: that the part of me that does not belong, my perpetual alienation, has been laid onto this act. But I reckon I do belong now, and these words remind me of the very thing they allayed.
So, I must get off this desk, if not forever, then for a little bit. And when I do return to it, I hope I do it on a whim. And maybe, to write a story for a change.