Why I Write. (Creative Nonfiction semester one)

                                                            Why I Write

Why do I write? I write for many things and sometimes many people. Mostly, I write to take everything built up in my heart and to purge it. Joy, sorrow, revenge, peace, every single raw emotion that is simply taking up too much space. Sometimes it isn’t merely a feeling; I purge people too. I write their stories or the pain I felt for them or because of them and then I let it go. I let them go and everything they ever made me feel about life, love or my worth.

I remember being a kid, knees shoved all the way up to my chest in my father’s jet-black mustang. The engine was loud but the melodies of Billy Joel were louder. As the music moved through my curls and pumped into my veins, I began to write on the windows fogged by the warm rain. I wrote my name, maybe also something about a boy in my 5^th grade class. I think his name was Bobby. What a boring name for a boy to like. When I wrote, I could see the world more clearly and people could see just a quick glimpse of the tiny girl in the black mustang. I realized I liked that.

I write to see the world and the world to see just enough of me to make them wonder. I write for myself and the occasional passer-by who decides to look over just at the right moment at a stop-light. I write for moments. Moments of pain or persecution. Moments of happiness. Moments of birth. I write because tearing shreds of my carpet would in no way make my father, hooked up to some poison disguised as medicine, hurt less. I write because my mother is far away, sometimes sad and I can’t hug her neck. I write because of the new life my sister brought through child baring pain, demonstrating the painful but beautiful suffering of my family. I write because of the love forbidden and the love I took a bite of anyway.  I write because a cup of joe can’t fix everything, even though on a Monday morning it sometimes feels that it does.

I write because speaking makes my face red and my hands shake. The keyboard could care less if I’m socially impaired. The ink in my pen doesn’t seem to mind that I would rather fill the lines of paper than the air with small talk. I write because sometimes a twenty-mile run still isn’t enough to let it all seep out. I write because at times my entire mind is a battlefield and the only weapon worth my time is a pencil.

I don’t remember the exact moment when I decided I wanted to be a writer. Was it in the jet black mustang with my full-bearded father, or the moment I saw him, facial hair falling out all over his pillow from disease? Was it in sixth grade when I was forced to write some “book” and use “imagination” and got in trouble for making all of my characters die in the end out of spite? Or was it the moment I experienced true pain and jotted down scribblings on my bedroom mirror, frizzy-haired and fourteen years of age? I think it was a compilation of all of it. I needed an outlet. A place to put all of those moments I didn’t want to recall anymore; a place to put all the moments I wanted to keep forever.

I believe it is impossible for any writer to pinpoint an exact moment in time they decided to write and why. As writers we do not discover writing; it discovers us. It finds us in our own mess and in our successes. It finds us in bed when we’re screaming into our pillows. It finds us when we’re driving down a flat highway, windows down and hand moving with the wind. Why do I write? I write because sometimes experiencing life once isn’t enough for me. I want to feel it, hear it and taste it all again. For me, writing does that.  I write to die and sometimes live again.