Living Behind A Page

Dear Diary, 16 March 2012

(Living behind a page...)

Words have the ability to embody everything in the whole world on a single piece of paper. They can express the deepest of emotions without sounding contrived; they can convey the most pure and most honorable of actions without uttering a sound. They can make a girl fall in love without ever being kissed; they can ignite within the soul a rage without an act of instigation. On a page, words can reach into the confounds of the mind and pull out something nobody knew existed. While the tongue is a part of the mouth, sharp and piercing, the pen has a way of softening the bite of thought. Thoughts flow from the brain to the page like a water current swept down the slope of a waterfall. What seems calm and undisturbed becomes a roaring deluge.

In my head, thoughts seem so much clearer. During an argument or discussion, some nugget of wisdom may pop up, and I think to myself, "What a great point!" But sadly, by the time that thought has traveled its way to my tongue, the words are halting and broken. In the end, the point never comes across as clear as I think it was in my head. However, though a longer trip from hand to temple, my thoughts usually manage to cross that distance in one piece.

Why I started writing may be attributed to this fact. Because I have somewhat of a speech impediment, always tripping over my words and stumbling through half-thought cogitations. Where the meaning may suffer in speech, the moral is sure to translate through the pen. Not to mention that my brain flows freer in text than with tone.

People at church, relatives in the family, friends here and there: they all preach the message of use your gifts to glorify God. Do what you can to help others, they say. God beseeches us to carry out his work among men. More often than not, though, I wonder what could I do to that end? What do I have that I could possibly make a difference to somebody else? Accurate though it may be, writing is only effectual when there is a reader. I cannot hand out pamphlets to everyone I meet.

There is a draw-back to this truth that I live, this written world that I perceive. I cannot live my life behind a page, although it is hard to come out from behind it. Words...they are powerful, but they are not mine. I cannot bend them to my will as I can the plot of a story. They have lives of their own, affecting those whom they touch. Each already possesses its own meaning, a meaning I cannot alter. From my mouth, these words seem trite, over-used, banal. Nobody likes the voluble little library girl, spitting out words she has only read in books and knows not how to correctly pronounce them. Who does not know how to intricately arrange them in speech, which has no backspace key.

Life is lived face-to-face, not through an alternative world of writing. By no means am I degrading writing, for indeed it is largely my life. My dilemma remains, however. Knowing how to write is only as effectual as the reader reads. Once interest is hindered, the spell is broken. During that time in between, the writer has only minutes (perhaps less) to weave a reality alternative to this one. From one person to another, this magic has no bond. Beside my friend, she had no knowledge of my love for her besides that which I say. Words on a page may hold meanings in and of themselves, but the actions behind them reinforce their original intent and transpose them into a reality that is living and breathing.

Courageous as writing is, it takes a deal more to make writing meaningful. It takes guts to go outside the dull monotony normalcy, if that is what your writing intends to accomplish, as most writing does. To curve the average road of unswerving redundancy, characterized by lack of feeling and emotion. For writing to have substance it must have heart, and heart is so alive it cannot be created out of nothing.

I must break from this prison of fear, fear of the unknown, of what these words put to use could achieve. A scientist may construct the most astonishing of inventions in blueprints, but without the science to reinforce his idea, the concept is null. What point is there? Without the possibility of being real, whatever is on paper has no purpose.

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