the-warriorpoet:
A writer doesn’t measure life in seconds, minutes, days, or years. He measures it in moments, some happening in a second while lasting for a year, while other years pass in only a second, remembering sighs as screams but shouts as whispers. A writer won’t remember the date of your anniversary, unless he’s lucky, but you can be sure that he’ll never forget the way his heart pounded in his throat as you giggled and nodded, and the blood rushed to his head as a sigh of relief slipped from his lips as he thought he’d pass out from excitement. How saying each word was Hercules fighting the Hydra, forcing out one after the other with a tongue dumbed with lead while head after head appears to replace it’s brethren before it finally lies slain, when just getting that one sentence out made him feel like a conquering god. Those agonizing seconds following as he waited for your reply, each beat of his heart a booming drum keeping an all too actue sense of time. A writer remembers; count on that. He remembers the way your hugs felt just like you, and only you, and the comfort they once brought, warming cold skin and an even colder heart as the wind raged and vicious snowflakes lashed at exposed cheeks and hands. A writer remembers your protests and pleas to wait till tomorrow, saying you’ll see me then, and how bright your smile as he replied that waiting in the ice and snow for an hour was worth even one minute if he got to spend that minute with you sooner. He remembers the way your eyes would dance and smile even when you felt like acting cross at him for cajoling you to join him in the snow, just to see how he’d react. But don’t think, because of this, that a writer sees only through rose-tinted glasses. Any writer who is serious about writing would agree that he is no romantic, and nowhere near hopeless at that, but that he is, first and foremost, a truth teller and a story sharer, because any truth worth telling deserves embellishment. And he will tell that story, by God, because telling stories is the only way he knows how to hurt and to bleed and to heal. He writes because writers are fragile, easy to please, but easier to crack and to damage and to break. He writes to remember, to open old wounds, blood pouring out and the stench of bitterness seeping through, the words a painful, burning truth as the infection is cauterized, sealed shut, and in doing so he writes to heal; as wounds heal and turn to scars he writes further, rubbing and poking and prodding at them, wishing they’d go away until eventually his perpetual sanding leaves barely any trace of scars and so in writing, he writes to forget. He writes to remember the sound of your voice and the color of your eyes and how yours were so different, so unique from everyone else’s even though everyone else’s were just as unique as yours, because that doesn’t matter for so long as those eyes are your eyes, those eyes are the kindest eyes, the gentlest eyes, and the prettiest eyes, because he says so. He remembers how you changed, how he finally and grudgingly began to notice that your words didn’t exactly match up with what you said, that the possibility of Another is all too possible. He writes and he remembers not the day, not the month, lucky if the year, but the moment, the moment he realizes with utmost certainty that what he had begged would not be true, was. He writes because he remembers the feel of your touch, and how your fingers like fangs traced furrows, gashes, and tears, your venom seeping through his skin, and slower but surer than any viper, a once-warmed heart turned back to ice. He writes to forget, how you came up to yay-high compared to him, the conversations you had late into the morning as the sun was about to rise for the next day, whispering lies and unfulfillable promises and half-truths, but with the sweetest tongue and, with the depravity of a hedonic dog, he lapped them up, not caring about the pain to come for the pleasure of the present. He remembers parting with a Stranger. A writer writes to kill a thousand times over, for his rage is boundless and terrifying but will never ever be displayed except through the words on the screen and the ink on the page, because the rage and the bitterness are poison, and the only solution is to suck out that poison and inject it into the paper’s flesh, hopefully getting enough out to save himself from succumbing on the next day, then the next, then the next. But the great irony of the writer’s life is that while in writing to remember, to heal, to forget, and to kill, he ultimately immortalizes. You will always live on in memory as a great “what-if,” a “once upon a time.” You may be only mentioned in passing as an anecdote, a faceless name or a nameless example, but he’ll remember. He’ll always remember no matter how hard he tries to forget, how hard he denies to all around him that he’d even recognize your face anymore. Don’t believe him; you’re with him forever. But whether it takes three days, three months, or three years, he is resurrected, and returns again with ashes raining from his hair and the smell of fire and smoke still hanging in the air, ready at last to write a new story, creating and telling the ugly truth through a beautiful lie.
