I once wrote that writing was a way to calm the fire that threatened to eat me alive, which was beautiful, until the next sentence classified the words I’d write as matches. You see, most people considered their first game, their first dance, or the time they learned to sing as important or life changing. For me, it was the first words I decided to put on paper because saying them out loud was harder. I was barely eight when I wrote my first lines, and twelve when I decided a full blown story could be fun. There was very little I could do because once I started writing, it took over my life. Like the way you make friends on the first day of classes and suddenly it is the end of the semester and you look back to see you’ve done almost everything together with them. Writing was my unexpected friend; since I was young, since I could barely understand the value it had, or imagine the importance it would turn out to have to me. I’d write stories about the first guy I thought I’d liked and poetry to make sense of feelings that didn’t quite make sense to me. It was easy to write, because life then had been easy.
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When you start something, you rarely think about the trajectory it will take once it’s embedded in your life. Much like starting a race and only thinking about the finish line, I started writing and could barely think of ever wanting to stop, or of having any difficulties while wanting to write. I’d start poems and end them gracefully every time, barely having knowledge of what prose was. I’d write stories without an idea of when a climax should start. I’d always start and finish, not thinking about what I thought I was releasing, what stories I wanted to hide behind the lines on my paper.
There’s really no one to blame for my ignorance; I was little, and I didn’t understand that childhood friends are sometimes imaginary and that, once you grow, they can become monsters. At least, that’s what I deemed writing as, once I learned how deeply intertwined it was with my life. It wasn’t a friend, then, it was a monster, one of my own creation that I, ignorantly, wanted nothing to do with. I remember wanting to feel the same as I did once I started to write, but making sense of things at eight or twelve years old was very different from making sense of things at fifteen. It became too real, and writing, for a moment, was not a friend that helped me let go or have fun, it was a monster, trying to make me aware, as if I somehow wanted a know-it-all friend (teenage me surely didn’t, I wouldn’t be writing this otherwise). For me writing was an escape, but growing up taught me that there was little it could do when my own hand was the one giving it text.
It knew me too well. I had spent years of my life with it and I loved it, but it was too much, and I knew better, so I abandoned it. I was scared of the power my words had, of the own fire I had let them create, and everything I couldn’t handle then, I was adamant of leaving behind.
I stopped writing but the fire was never snuffed out.
I had to harshly find out that it was easy to escape and write about the world, about others, about feelings, in a disconnected way to ourselves but it was never as easy to write about myself. That was my turning point. I didn’t look at a mirror and wanted to fight, I simply wrote myself and then deemed writing at fault. It’s funny, in a way. I was simply scared and angry with myself, and finding out through this dear love that there were parts of me I did not like, was betrayal at its worst. Writing was, once again, by my side, taking the brunt of it, this time represented by endless papers waiting to be inked.
It took me a long time to fill in the blanks. I barely remember what I wrote when I decided to walk alongside my friend again. I do know it took me a long time to go back, and even longer to write words directed at myself. I was like an athlete, getting their cast removed and thrown into the field again, the first steps shaky with fear, waiting for another ankle to break. Now, I find myself writing much like I was; it laughs with me, cries with me, and sometimes helps me forget that there are still days I come to hate it again.
My friend once asked me why I cried the first time I read the lyrics to “First Love” by SUGA. If you read this and listen to the song, you can perfectly answer why: it sums it up perfectly. Sometimes, your dear friend, your first love and regret, it’s not a person, but something of your own creation, that never left your side, even through the hardships, or at the risk of never going on.
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