Why I Write

 

I will say it here, loud and proud: I love words.

Poems, language, prose— any form of language that can tell a story from the heart. Since the dawn of my existence, I have thought up grand adventures for a pantheon of characters, scribbled down enough poetry to fill a forest’s worth of paper, sent thousands of witty texts that bewilder my friends, and written a million essays fleshing out every little detail of my life. 

Two or three-year old me can attest to this love

of literature. Yes, even back in the days, when I had two puffy afro pigtails and missing front teeth, I had a lot to say. I would read street signs from the back seat at age two, to the point of exasperating my poor mother. 

“Mommy, it says stop! Stop, Mommy, stop!”

“Look, it says yield! How do you say that? Yee-eld?

Did you yield? What’s yielding?”

Being able to read these words of utter

importance (at the time) was the epitome of excitement. That’s what started my love for words-- being able to crack people’s code and know exactly what they want to tell you. How cool is that? 

Soon enough, I began writing to tell the stories

that filled my head. Little Me had an imagination that worked at a rate of a zillion miles a minute, to the point where I would have so many stories that my relatives would have to memorize all of the names of my characters so that they could understand what I was talking about. I took advantage of the stack of printer paper laying on my mini desk, and wrote zany, wild fantasies. Every day I would come to my mom with my ‘books,’ proudly asking her to hole-punch the pages and bind it with brads. Now, there is a box in the back of her closet brimming with my books about Marmalade the cat who sneaks out to her secret cat-city, Zook the Zorkyth, or go-karting aliens.

My writing evolved drastically, just as I did, in

middle school. It reflected the waves of new emotions: Volatility. Anger. Despair. Euphoria. Insecurity. Terror. The awkward phase where I’m no longer a kid but not yet an adult had me questioning everything: Why are my clothes all wrong? Why does everyone have Instagram? What are these black and white shoes everyone has? Wait, oh my god, people are dating? What the heck do you do with a boyfriend? Am I too tall? Why do I struggle to look these kids in the eye? Why am I sweating and wanting to die when I have to hold a conversation? Am I a failure? Who knows how to succeed? Where am I going? Why?

The page became an eye of the storm, a place

where these emotions could overflow. Especially once that one emotion to end all emotions happened. You know, that all-consuming feeling, when you can’t tear your eyes away from someone and you’d do any crazy thing to talk to them; where you get all nervous and sweaty and fidgety and stalk their every move. Love? Possibly. Lust? Probably. The feeling scared me into writing down how “it feels like I have a bottomless monster that exists in me." It helped to scribble it out in aggressive pencil marks. 

I wrote my poem “Dissonance” when I

felt overwhelmed: “I feel so lost in all the noise/ I can almost see it, as jagged lines moving around me/ unharmonically/ Clashing and grating against one another.” Once my words were on paper, the emotions were tangible. I could “float above it all/ and look down” upon the chaos. “Silence is somewhere higher. / I will ride wings into it, / so that the buzzing is at my feet / and out of my heart.” After being seen with my writer’s eye, the demon left my heart where it bothered me, and took on a harmless form. 

From authors that make me think, I want my voice

to sound like that. In the present, when something beautiful resonates, I get these shivers that go up my spine and through my arms, telling me, write this down, make it eternal! Even moments as simple as “the lanky, towering tree on the quad gracefully filtering the sunlight into dramatic shadows” bring me delight. “There is depth, love, delight, that lies within details,” I simply needed the power of writing to notice them.

I wonder: how do I make my characters come to

life, like the ones in my favorite stories? Good stories reveal to me some truth. I’ve discovered that ‘truth’ comes from my motives... So perhaps I can find them in a character’s story. The emotion, imagination, fear, and inspiration, that lies within something or someone else. I will try to be the vessel; the pen filled with the ink of motivation, moved by the hands of my subjects, and flowing with motivation.