Untamed Sanctions

“I miss your writing. Do you still write, anyway?”

The black text sat on my screen, as I rubbed my tired eyes from whiling away countless hours in front of my laptop. The message in my inbox was from an old friend, someone who had always been there to share a word or two on whatever drivel of writing I had to shove in their face. The question itself was amusing, to me, because only a few days before I had asked myself the same question. Being in this place, that was so familiar now, yet has changed so much has made writing seem that little bit farther away than it used to be. Really, I just let it slip too easily. I didn’t lean how to let it move with me. On the one hand, I gained freedom and mobility. On the other, I let some part of me stay behind, collect dust and linger until I had remembered that it was something I enjoyed, something he enjoyed. Something they enjoyed.

So much time spent on something so continuous. It wasn’t even one of those phases where the idea was fleetingly ‘cool,’ yet stopped after a couple of days. There was an attachment to it all, right down to the basic output of where it all lived. A few times I tried to continue the trend I started, elsewhere, disjointed from it all, but I could never bring myself to do the deed. Nothing felt right about the way it started. Where should it begin? Why shouldn’t it continue from where it once was left? And yet, it all came down to the fact that it just couldn’t compare. There was no familiarity, no personality. No matter what, I could not shake the feeling that I was still leaving it all behind. Everything about it felt half-assed and that was something which I could not tolerate, something which I felt was far from my style and ability.

It makes me wonder what took so long for me to get this far and realise exactly what it was I had been missing all this time. Sure, there were a lot more things involved now than used to exist in my life, but that just seams to be a ‘in the meantime’ excuse for leaving it all. So many things happened back when I made this a larger part of my life that I have become so detached from. People I had encountered, who I don’t even remember or recognise anymore. Things that were said that I struggle to remember their significance or relevance.

So here I sit, as I finally smile at my success of reviving the old, the lost, the forgotten. I am home. All together, nothing separated. Finally. I reply.

Yes, I still write.

Writing isn’t the same as it used to be, in many senses. Back in the old days there used to be typewriters, but that removed the personality within writing. Sure, there’s the way someone writes, the way things are expressed and written but that still doesn’t seem the same. Handwriting can say a lot about a person, more than one may actually believe - where you were sitting, how you were writing with your wrist, how fast or how slow; it all can be told just by ones handwriting.

Typewriters were always there, removing the personality within writing and making anything anyone ever said look the same as everyone else. No matter what they said or who they were as a person, the black ink and standard font made it look as common as anyone else’s work, and it wasn’t until you took a closer examination at the writing that you realised what you had in front of you. The same can be said for meeting a person face-to-face, only its their physical appearance that immediately displayed something about the person, without you having to take too much time to ask questions.

Even now we’re just as common and anonymous with writing via a computer. Online publishing makes a slight change, allowing virtual space to look like anything that the owner wants, usually but that can only be created ‘personal’ to a certain extent. At the end of the day, there’s still someone out there with the same background colour as you, perhaps even the same title. With so many users online, it makes it difficult to be unique, personal and noticeable with something as simple as a user name - the only other easily created option that shows something about you, immediately.

It gets touchy when you move into the field of common appearance. How does one define themselves, how do I make what I am writing now seem my own, unique and personal when it doesn’t show anything about me at all. My handwriting certainly isn’t here, the evidence of how I put each letter on page in ink isn’t able to be deciphered through this common Windows default font. How can I be me, by using a user name, when there are so many other people online who also possibly (and most likely) share the same name as you to identify themselves? When a service denies use of a name because it is already taken, how can you represent you on a personal level when the name you desired was used by someone else?

We all have things in common, but technology and more “convenient” methods unnecessarily make everyone too common and too similar. We don’t particularly need these methods to do any of the tasks we do today, it just happens to be that they are more common. It’s easier to find a free online publishing service such as Blogger or even Wordpress to share your views, opinions, ideas and creativity to the world than it is to put greater effort into publishing a book with the same views or ideas. People have time, they just don’t want to spend that time doing something productive, because it would require dedication and effort. Perhaps that or their ideas and views are so common or similar to other peoples that they feel comfortable not doing anything more with their work.

Time is everything, and always something that we believe we never have enough of. You certainly cannot get back the time you lost or used, so why is it easier to spend hours upon hours playing a game but not to spend something as little as forty-five minutes writing or doing something that expresses who you are. You are never the night elf warrior you create in a game, the game makes you that way, gives you only a limited options of “expression” that can, and will, begin to look similar or exactly the same as every other player in the realm.

We are much happier to be nothing, than something.

“I wouldn’t want to cross your path,” he said smiling politely at me. I felt slightly amused by this, intrigued about what kind of power I could possibly possess. I had no idea what he really meant by his words, and even if he truly thought of them to be what he actually wanted to say. Had he been reading me correctly to begin with? Still, I entertained the idea and begged him to continue, to explain and tell me more.

“You just seem to have this ‘don’t fuck with me’ kind of attitudes, you just kind of notice that you shouldn’t be crossed with,’ he explained. I felt my face contort into a look of confusion – I was thinking about this one, trying to decipher the clues. Perhaps I just don’t pay enough attention to the things that I say or do, perhaps I can’t see that I am a hostile person but I sure as hell didn’t feel like one. Not unless provoked, at least. “I’m not really sure what to tell you,” I started, “I don’t feel as though I do anything particularly aggressive, where did you get this idea from, anyway?”

“Your writing,” he said.

I sifted through some old writings of mine I had kept in a drawer from previous years. Story upon story with notes written upon several pages and additional notes written in the margins and arrows running all over the place, leading to new sections, directing sentences elsewhere; it all seemed to familiar, yet felt so different but I was sure that things hadn’t changed all that much since then – I was the same person, surely I would be the same writer? I stared at the book lying on my desk, my own name plastered on the top in large point font. So much effort poured into that book, and none of it felt the same way as it used to when I began, or when other stories would pour out of my creative stream of consciousness. So had I changed, or was I just imagining it? Perhaps I shouldn’t have let myself go idle while I waited for things to be published and perhaps I shouldn’t have focused too much of my time an attention on my children. Steven is sixteen, after all; he is of the age where he can look after himself fairly decently.

My sweet little Anita, my precious little girl, she always manages to distract me from my work and I suppose that was why I found things so easy to put off, so easy to ignore. She’s so young that hours could be spent with her, and she’ll still feel as though they have only been minutes; her eyes always light up when I open my study room door – she knows mummy’s stopped writing for the day. It always makes me smile to see her little eyes light up like a Christmas tree, with a smile on her face as she sits in front of my door clutching her teddy bear that her father bought her. “Teddeze” was the name she gave the soft plush bear and her only way of remember her father after he died of terminal cancer several months ago. Every day I stop and wonder if she’ll ever fully be able to deal with that and come to some kind of period where grief doesn’t plague her. His death hit us all hard, I was struggling just to finish my book on time and I found less and less enthusiasm for it the more I continued on without him.

Mornings weren’t the same, either. He was never there anymore on his days off to make breakfast for us as a surprise on his days off, he was never there just to occupy the house with his voice, his presence and his laughter. As insane as it is to think of it, the house doesn’t even feel as warm as it once did – could death truly affect a house, could it too perhaps feel a loss in some kind of way? I hit hurdles now that I find almost impossible to jump, and it used to be he who would encourage me to continue, to push out those few extra ideas onto a notepad and come back to them later. The idea that anyone can invest so much of their life into someone else that it becomes almost inoperable when that person is gone seems so ridiculous. Surely I am not the kind of person who would rely on someone else to live, to breathe, to do and to be? I still have my angel, my Anita, and my man of the house, Steven. Why wouldn’t life still feel full, why wouldn’t my heart still feel enriched?

I write now out of guilt, out of pity for myself because I hadn’t since my book. I know that this is what he would want me to continue to do, with as much passion and livelihood as I used to possess. Yet this all still feels like complete shit, as though I can never be the writer I used to be, the inventor of stories I used to adore, to know where I was taking them and understand they had a purpose, a meaning and a detailing point to them. This all still feels like shit.

When will the questions end?

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Fantastic.

That is all. For now.