Unwritten

In those days, there was less of me, and more of everyone else. I was a shadow, a sliver, an unimportant cameo in movies starring everyone else. I was the disembodied narrator, recording, remembering, unspoken commentary lining the walls of my skull.

 

Photo by Toa Heftiba on Unsplash

Unwritten"

I’m a writer, but writing doesn’t happen to me all that often. They are two separate feelings – almost indescribable in their distinction. When I’m writing, I take control of the words, or emotion takes control of me. Anger, usually. Sometimes spite. Sometimes the crushing lack of will to live drives me down, down, down into a whirlpool of words forgotten as soon as they appear on the screen.

But when the writing happens to me, it all changes. For a precious hour or so, I’m one of the greats. I’m outside my own body, not allowed to look at what my fingers are creating. Not until it’s done!

When I’m finally allowed to look, usually a few days after it’s posted, I’m left in awe. It’s transcendent. One of a kind. I would never be able to write like that.

The oddness of the distinction takes me by surprise every now and then. But mostly, I’m unsurprised. I have nothing to offer the world, after all. I have no stories to spin of my own. Just a narrator, a detailed descriptivist who chronicles the world as it happens around her.

As it happens to other people.

People fascinate me. I lean into them, into their personalities, their social media profiles, their long forgotten blogs. I’m the girl that reads your aunt’s sister’s son’s blog, when you don’t even know me.

In the early days, I used to read everything, watch everything, remember everything. Birthdays of people I’d gone to school with for 2 years back when I was 8 years old were carefully written down in every calendar and diary. The best friend fights my school time bullies had were followed with deep interest. The power dynamics of the coolest as well as the uncoolest gangs in school I knew like the back of my hand.

No one was deemed too uninteresting to be watched.

In those days, there was less of me, and more of everyone else. I was a shadow, a sliver, an unimportant cameo in movies starring everyone else. I was the disembodied narrator, recording, remembering, unspoken commentary lining the walls of my skull.

And those stories, they were perfect. Beautiful. Transcendent. For the ages.

But nothing perfect lasts forever. Somebody always starts to get too big for their shoes. The narrator shouldn’t aspire to be the lead. They just haven’t got the face for it. Or the figure.

The stories, they warped around me. They were distorted now, leaking objectivity and losing sheen at a rapid pace. They had become… ordinary.

What had once been a beautiful narrative was now just… life. Ugly, lumpy, filled with pain. And still I sought those rare moments of euphoria. I fought to frame memories, isolate them from context; fought to preserve them forever. Except this time, I wanted myself in them, preserved right in the middle of them. I wanted to be the hero.

These days, there’s more of me and less of everyone else. And so the more I lean into them, trying to see past their personas and into the depths of their souls, the more I project myself into them. I contaminate their stories with my own fantasies, my notions of who I want them to be. And I find that I much, much prefer these perfect versions of them.

Even though who they really are makes for a much better story.