I can't swim in the silence of you skin; please let me in.
I was going through my old, unfinished stories this afternoon & re-reading everything that I’d abandoned; analyzing the story lines. Were they bad, or did I just give up for no reason?
The latter is more likely.
Why did I never continue any of them? The farthest I had gotten was 15 pages in. Then the words just cut off.
The truth is, I never had enough discipline to finish anything.
I still don’t.
I had begun the search through my old stories looking for one in particular. One that stuck out in my mind and kept popping up at odd times recently; one that I had actually liked.
But it was nowhere to be found.
Should I keep searching? Or should I let sleeping story-corpses lie and not disturb the ghosts of old ideas?
It may be too frustrating to rifle through the crevices of my brain for the words long ago transcribed.
I’m in a similar position. So much of my writing is left unfinished or barely started, but just recently, I’ve realized how afraid I am of letting things end. It’s why I want to die young—so I don’t establish anything, whether inside or outside myself. I’m scared of rooting myself into something, scared that it’ll break. And in books, I don’t finish books, and I don’t finish my writing, because I am afraid to part with everything, to say goodbye. I don’t know if it’s anything you could relate to, but it’s not always a “lack of discipline.” Don’t be so eager to put yourself down. <3
2 months agoA Tree Grows In Brooklyn.
Stumbling around on the internet, I came across an article written by an anonymous book lover. He records an anecdote about how, while on the train one day, he caught a young girl reading over his shoulder. She then proceeded to tell him about how she was an English Lit Major, and read constantly. But she was never able to find anything that she loved as much as what she read when she was 12 years old. The author then goes on to talk about how true that statement is; how avid readers never really find anything that changes their life so much, as the book that really got them started reading.
This whole thing just struck me as very true. I mean, I read all the time. There is never a moment where I am not in the middle of at least three books. But as much as I love them all, there really has never been a book that changed the way I look at things so much as A Tree Grows In Brooklyn. What a beautiful, beautiful book. It’s one of the first books I can remember reading, and holding close to my chest after finishing it, because I just didn’t want to let it go.
I still have that book; the pages are yellowed and folded. Maybe today I’ll pick it up and read it again.
Who knows? Maybe it will change my life once more.
P.s.- I’m really afraid of my feelings for you. I’m not sure what to do.
Three books in total influenced my belief systems and how I am now, but there is no book in the world that will ever touch me as much as Peter S. Beagle’s The Last Unicorn. It sounds so juvenile and needlessly “girly,” but it isn’t. At all. I loved it. It’s in my treasure box, still, after five years. I tear up just thinking about it. Beautiful book. I will never, can never, forget it.
2 months ago