It feels like I’m returning to writing, now. I haven’t let myself write the last two days, simply because writing had become something else. It had become too much about seeing my notification button turn orange—about getting a new follower, or finding a new comment. I’m not saying that I don’t want that to happen once I post this, but at least I’m not writing for the sake of that alone.
These days I’m afraid of a lot of things. Of not knowing what it’s going to be like two years from now. Of not knowing what I want to do, or half-knowing and then worrying if I’ll be able to do it. Most of all, I’m afraid that I’ll want nothing from life. There is such a thing as being overly content.
Today, I want to write about something else, though. Something else that scares me. Something beautiful. Poetry. I’m afraid of poetry and what it doesn’t do for me. I’m unsure while reading it. I’m reluctant about writing it. There’s a space somewhere and it isn’t distance. It’s strangeness. An unfamiliarity that cannot breached. My words refuse to fall into that space, and the words in that space refuse to come to me. We look at each other from either side of a glass window, unfeeling.
It’s funny looking back, because writing began with poetry for me. We were doing something by Tagore, and to keep myself from falling asleep, I screwed around with his words and made something of a parody. My friends found it funny and that was encouragement enough for me to do more. Soon, I tried making my own rhymes. It was easy, then, in the way that everything is when you begin for the first time. Even reading poetry was easy. Because it was school and metaphors where nothing more than literary devices. They never escaped the page.
Poetry is different now. It has been ever since I’ve joined college. It has changed even as I’ve understood what it is with other people. Slowly, I’ve come to realise that I never knew poetry, that I never had the words. I think it is this disillusion that has left us feeling like this. I feel ill-equipped to read it. I could let my eyes take them, or my voice, but these words refuse to say anything. It is the same when I’m writing. My words are quiet. I can get them to rhyme, but not to speak. There’s a certain lethargy. There’s a silence on both ends, and it’s disheartening.
But I cannot let go just yet. I love poetry even more, now that it scares me. There are moments when I’m just taken over by something. I run for a pen and sit before the blank paper. Sometimes that’s all that happens, but that’s okay. At least the feeling’s alive. We’ll get to know each other again, Words. Someday soon. And then we’ll weave the same magic that we believe in wholly, even if it’s only us who can see it.
thebeard 