Un-deading a Writer

It didn’t take long for life to squeeze out my dreaming and fantasising self. It was a mostly painless process. I imagine I was like the frog that thought it was enjoying a Jacuzzi while slowly being boiled to soup. It was the end of creation, nothing Armageddon-like, just the quietest of deaths in general. No one mourned for no one noticed nor cared as quickly surrogate amusement increasingly became part of the daily routine. Somewhere in the virtual drug induced sleep, I lolled once too often, and let my creativity guzzle out the last spit of life. It could have returned as a vampire, nocturnal and sporadic, if I had given it a proper burial, but there was a growing discomfort of self-doubt that worked wonders to let the loss remain unacknowledged and ignored; it became a glob of putrefied old idea and the liquid stank of failure.

It hasn’t been great without that nagging and attention seeking self which would make me vomit out words one after the other to see if they made any sense as they appeared in some physical form.

But death cannot be eternal as life isn’t eternal too. So, I returned to the undead. I realized for another time that it’s not happiness or sadness that made me write, it was my stupid ego that pushed the cart over the rainbow bridge, hoping to avoid the absolute muck, and land on a semi decent piece of literature to remember the day by. I would forget what I had written just as soon as I put the last full-stop in place, and would write again the next day, the desire to express clawing at the keyboard in synchronized patterns.

The gladness of having made something that at least sounded good when read out loud satisfied me, and pushed away that heavy blanket that continually bows us down in. The thick cosy blanket someone had put over me, over you, promising safety and security. It is woven with the needle pressure of getting a good job, the thread work is pulled with the will of finding a profitable career, the covers hide well and present a functional family, and the frills uselessly advertise a life well lived though all they do is get dirty. This blanket or adult sized tent keeps you safe from the sun and the rain, the cold and the storm, but is the weather all that a place has to offer? You sometimes get curious to see what else is out there but a sudden breeze proves to be too chilly sensitive skin, and you never dare to pull it away from you. By the time you may have realized that you have lived the life of a slave with the total experience of a child, that tent becomes your shroud and all you have the energy left for is to lie straight with your eyes shut, waiting for the grim reaper to roll a dice and place you in your box.

It doesn’t matter how I started. I have reached where I was supposed to though I didn’t know it when I began.