19th May 2021

I’ve always wondered about what it would be like to write a book. As a young child, books seemed to be a simple given. Always there. Preeminent and waiting. This seemed obvious to my younger self. Like food and water.

Then, as if overnight, there is a covert shift. You begin to grasp language and get a taste for its sheer magnitude, its warmth and its capacity. And then, it hits you. Or rather, it shows you. Books don’t just happen. I feel ridiculous saying this now, but then I remember that I was once clueless about reproduction. You slowly begin to realise that books are born of a need. A need that assumes many faces, sometimes multiple, hidden beneath a familiar format. Many are born to instruct, to control, to enlighten and so on. Born from duty. Yet a vast majority, the ones that bear the individual mark of things once private and untold, exist because of a burning need. Of private duty.

Then, I suppose, it is the latter that transfixes me so powerfully. An urgent desire to put part of myself into a vessel and thrust it into the physical world. To be held (potentially anyway, lets not get too confident) and cherished. Actually, scratch that. I want something for myself, a reminder that I collected the courage to put myself, as best as I can, onto paper.

However, this story is by no means complete or entirely accurate. It will morph over time, my mind will waver between a variety of positions I have rooted myself in over the years. Yet the story I write now. As in, right now. Will stay in its mould. It’s a worrying thought, but a hurdle I must simply ignore and discard.

I’m upset that most people have read many books, but have never allowed their own voice speak to them like this. This is what I’m doing. I’m speaking to myself so others can conjure the urge to do it themselves - if they want to, that is.

Brief snippets. That’s all this book is. But like all memories, they largely consist of whatever is left in their wake - the burnt, smoking patch of black left after impact. The entry wound is intangible; all you have is the trail of feeling that hovers around you like agitated flies. You try to find it and point it out, the words collapse, you fight the confused swarm until your arms get tired and you give up. Another day maybe. Years and days later, the exit wounds appear, stealthy droplets from a ceiling, a scratch as you sleep, you wake up and all of this is now pooling from the old scar - the hurt you always anticipated would emerge rounds the corner, but with a breadth of pain that you could never have imagined until now.

I’m equally troubled and enlivened by my urge to write all of this down. It recently occurred to me that this is no longer something that I may choose to do, but something I absolutely have to. The latter frightens me a great deal, but I don’t feel I have a choice anymore. I’m already ashamed by the little snippets and notes that I’ve deemed worthy enough to put down. A feeling that rises almost immediately after writing something. For a very long time, I led myself to wholly believe that it was these attempts at disclosing myself that caused this feeling. That I was embarrassing and harming myself by attempting to reveal it, and that it would be much more beneficial to just smother it and move on. But it is precisely the fact that I am scared of how I feel -the desire to hide under my bed whilst everything I’ve ever experienced or felt or thought or wished or ignored or hoped thrashes around in a muffled tantrum (or crying fit) above me - that I must do something to abate all of you inside of me.

So, here we are.