ABOUT ME

WHY WRITING?

“Go on, ask me any word” I told my mother, big eyes and tooth gaps in place. 

“I don’t need to. It’s okay, I know you know”

“Just Ask” I would reply, after which, my mother would proceed on to think of all the 6 year old words she could come up with for her pesky daughter to rhyme. 

Yes, I liked to rhyme. It was just my thing. My jam (insert all the cool American slang I can without being offensive) 

(Also, I beg you, I know it’s a lot to ask, but please don’t judge)

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Flash-forward 6 years 

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I remember a hand clasping me. Shaking me, moving me the way I had been moved so many times. But this was different. I had never been pressed so hard against paper. Never had I been so firmly fixed between pointy canines, chains of flesh and bone twisting me. 

I remember that sensation. It felt good. 

I sat there, thinking about what I wanted to write. Well not really, because it just happened you know? Like a misplaced, unplanned kiss, the start of something wonderful yet so frightening. It was the first time I thought about writing, writing anything. 

I still remember it as if were yesterday, sitting on my school bench, my best friend blabbering in the background about Hannah Montana’s newest episode (yes, she was a thing back then and yes, I didn’t start writing till much later in life) 

I wrote a poem about color. Literally, it was just how “blue just blew”, “green is mean” and “brown is wearing a gown”

My rhyming addiction had come back. 

I showed it to my best friend. She loved me or it, I don’t know. But whatever it was, it stuck. I started writing more, about more and more trivial topics. There was one about snow white and classrooms and water conservation. I rhymed and wrote, without a lot of meaning. But my best friend always, always would be the first one to read my poems and my biggest cheerleader. If it wasn’t for the confidence she gave me, I wonder if I would be here, siting on my floor lobby in my PJ’s writing this assignment in the first place. 

I owe her a great deal. 

There was a piecing sensation, like someone was just now opening a new present. It felt like I was finally being removed from the shopping bag, removed to be worn for the first time. I was excited. 

I was read and re-read by her friends and her. I guess I was something special, what, I do not know. I am merely a piece of paper after all.

Years later, I lay in a baby blue envelope, waiting for those moments of nostalgia, when a familiar hand comes looking for me, clutches me, pulling me out and rereading me, trying to straighten the wrinkles of time

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Then there came a phase when I detested poems. I hated how they were so packed with meaning and somehow, we were supposed to decode them, how we were supposed to understand what they meant. Or maybe it was something else, maybe I was just done with poems. Whatever it was, I started writing stories. I liked stories, I liked the detail, the life that you could breathe into the inanimate through words. They excited me. That is when I really, really fell in love with writing. Through the books I read and how I used to try to mimic them, writing stories with similar starts but different endings, with similar characters but different lives. It was great. 

Then, somewhere along the lines, my English teachers thought of my love as some sort of prowess. It’s not everyday you come across someone so passionate about their third language, they thought. I was roped in the school team and at the stake of sounding immodest, I became their favorite. I started writing left right and center. Debates, speeches, articles and the like. What started merely as a mindless hobby turned into passion that turned into what felt like a job. 

It was great. 

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Flash-forward 4 years. 

Enter college. English wasn’t my passion anymore, I needed it to survive. 

My black surfaces had never encountered such pressure before, such urgency. I had been typed on before but this was different. The delete button was the finger’s best friend. But slowly, a rhythm formed. A lot of keys were pressed again and again. 

I remember the sensation. It was great. It felt good. 

At college, with a myriad of writing courses, I have finally found my place, between poems, essay’s and reflections.