the job of a writer

As a writer, I must observe the earth as if everything unfolding before me were a delicate petal slipping through the ring of my right thumb. I’m grasping it, I’m nearly there at having it all figured out but I’ll have to take another look- that’s my attitude on everything I discover. I’ll look at you, but not only in the eyes, and I won’t just read you like a book. I f you let me, I’ll submerge myself completely into water colored by the ink of your most terrible impulses. I’ll learn to memorise the way your knees click, how many times a day you tiptoe, what fingers you use to tap surfaces. I’ll notice how the wind creates fluctuations in our lives and I’ll learn that though I cannot grasp, I can try to imitate nature’s way of dancing with me and waltz across paper to explain it all. I’ll never be able to explain it all, and the size of the shard you’re given is either too big or too small- we’ll never know. What I can know is, what I’ll search to listen for at 4am (crickets), what emotions allow me to sink into a leather chair and what environment spills like hot lava over my nerves. I can learn how to sink languidly with how being this “me”, this “human”, feels like. I haven’t been given an instruction booklet so sometimes I still can’t fathom reactions this body will muster up; but I have figured out that this lead digging into paper or what my mind is able to string together and expel into the outer world will always be my task and my mother’s embrace. Not like a net or an anchor, but more like an overhead cloud or the gravel under my feet.

I think the biggest gift is being able to find beauty in the smallest of occurrences. And constantly being shocked by it, like a child.