End of Semester: Why I Write Part Two.

We were asked to re-write an assignment we did in the first week of class to note how we have changed, titled : Why I Write.
Enjoy.

Britney Davis

Ms. Jones

November 11, 2014

           

                                                            Why I Write

Why do I write? I often write to cling to the things that I feel are slipping through my grasp. So many things leave and when they do they leave with such haste we never have the time to really taste them for what they are. Writing allows me to catch a moment, a person, a feeling of bewitching or distain and to capture it just long enough to feel it for all it can be. I like to dance in the meadow of this short life, the dusk of death hastily approaching, letting my limbs flail around in the night air just to catch one firefly of a moment. Once I catch it, I write it. I put the jar up to my face and study my captive. I memorize every morsel of it’s existence, regurgitate it and then I set it free. What a shame it would be to catch such a fleeting, beautiful thing and not allow myself the chance to understand it.

I write so that I never forget the things he said to me in that white-walled, fluorescent-lit room. I write so that I never forget that day where we stood in the rain, my hand lingering in that handshake longer than it should. I write so that I never forget the brown chair; the one she sung over me in, her blue silk nightgown rocking me into slumber. I write so that I never forget how the sunlight hit my sister’s face, forming so many different shapes and objects onto her freckles beneath our fortress of leaves many falls ago. I write so that I may never forget the lessons that I learned through the laughter of a six year old, his front right tooth crowning the gums.

I write so that I might not forget how it felt to ride on his shoulders, baseball stadium lights revealing half of his features while cloud lightning highlighted the rest. I write so that I might not forget what it is to hear your own heart break and what it is to see it quilted back together with the thread from another. I write so that I might not forget the little things, the seemingly insignificant things like eyebrow stitches and red cowgirl boots. I write so that I might not forget the feeling of dancing to Billy Joel with my grandmother or riding in my grandfather’s blue pickup truck down a flat Oklahoma road.

I write to discover the woman I am through the memories of a girl I thought I knew. Sometimes I do not know what I think about the world until I have written about it. Sometimes I think I know who I am until I write, then I discover a new nook in my soul that I had not stumbled upon before. Writing is a like a flashlight in the unknown of my own psyche. It is always guiding me, re-directing my feet and showing me new corners and crevices of my own mind that I have neglected or forgotten was there.

Writing is all about capturing the precious things that could be lost or forgotten. My heart has fallen madly in love with the beauty of memoir. What greater way to re-live every beautiful, wild, painful, shameful, regretful, magnificent, take-your-breath away moment than to learn the art of writing a memoir. The memoir is the capturing of many fireflies. It is learning lessons from their hypnotizing glow and then letting them go back to whatever magical place it is that fireflies sleep. The memoir allows you to share your treasures and all of your dark places that hurt you, yet taught you the most about living, romance and simplicity. I write because it is the ultimate mentor, the most qualified of educators and the greatest lover a mind could take.