This Beast
Photos like this always make me want to writeWriting is brutally unfair. It is cruel and insidious. It's callous and careless.
It doesn't care about deadlines, about alarm clocks, about daylight. It hears nothing of "other obligations" or this thing called "stress". It doesn't know about these other things that I care about--it doesn't want to hear about my family or the really cool girls I've been meeting in these workshops with GLOW.
It's a greedy monster. It keeps me up at night, thinking, watching this movie in my mind that slowly magnetizes pixels of an image to click together and form a story like a scene from Inception. It halts; it breaks; it deviates, showing me a different picture. Like a vision, it's watery and hazy. I hear the words, I feel something.
And then it stops and replays.
And sometimes this is beyond comforting. Most nights, these unfinished pathways of stories lull me to sleep and let me drift off. But some nights it just keeps going, and my heart beats faster because I can feel it--I can feel when something is just so interesting. Just so exciting. And all I want to do is write.
Sleep be damned. Responsibilities be damned. Stress--oh, stress!--be damned too.
Lately I don't have much time, unfortunately, and the story replays slower and slower and sometimes it winks out--I don't know if this is from neglect (probably) or from an unsustainable story, but when that energy leaves it's horrible. It's depressing. It's like a best friend you tell all your secrets to giving you the cold shoulder.
Maybe it's bigger than that, because when the story lights up again, it's like dawn all over--light pierces through and there is just this boundless reserve of bouyant energy. The more you get taken away to do other things the energy ebbs, but if I'm lucky, it's still waiting.
I love starting a new story. It's engrossing, all-encompassing, and damn inconvenient (always!) but it is so much better than the lack of it. With out it, it's like something's missing, and all that energy goes into anxiety and this knot that forms between my shoulderblades. It's awful.
So I guess I'll take manic and beastial to empty and anxious any day. But still, Writing, sometimes you suck.
