Untamed

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?