“You are going to die in a year from today”
“Welp, That’s a bit dark, but ok”
“Now what?”
“Exactly… Now what?”
“I am going to write!”
“Exactly”
Somehow, I wrote every day without knowing I wanted to be a writer before having this conversation. It happened during one of those commonly occurring silent moments sitting alone.
I would readily invite the conversation but I never get the opportunity. He just takes the quiet solitude as his cue to demand responses to questions he already knows the answers to. And he is right. I set the optimum conditions knowing he will show up.
He makes me insecure with his confidence and absolute certainty. He’s never excited or pleading, just calmly clear. As for me, I waiver, I dilute, I doubt, then in the end, I’ve completely confused myself. The consistency of his clarity makes me painfully jealous. Uncomfortable but excited, I invite him in knowing that demands would be made of me to alter my life.
I would love to claim absolute obedience, but I grudgingly admit that when I reintegrate into the world with all of its vague, contradictory absurdity, I can become disobedient and waiver from his assignment. The advice of the world is so much more compatible with my fear; his… not so much.
But when the silence returns, after all the exposure to so many outside voices, I am assaulted with the same truth, unaltered. Shame then consumes me. On a good day, the shame pushes me into action. More often than not, I run into distraction to mute the shame and leave it to speak another day; only this time its tone is intensely angrier like a disappointed parent.
Today is a good day. And this writing, open to public consumption, is me being pushed into action. Today the fear of writing badly, of being completely unrelatable, of being basic, is insignificant to the scale of my desire to honor what I didn’t know, that I always knew, I want to do most. So today… I am a writer!
I do not actually know the hour or day when I will depart this place. but until then… I plan to leacve it different than I found it.