First, I wake up at 6 a.m. after a dream about not being ready for school. I jumped out of bed the moment I realized that school was OVER, to find that a) I was sweating like a pig (I've never actually seen a pig sweat...do they really?), b) I really had to pee, and c) the rumbles of thunder were real, not in my dream (so that's why they didn't really fit the scene at all, I thought), which leads into d) I wasn't in a very deep sleep. I tried to go back to sleep, but never did completely, and for a couple hours afterward my bed became a place of torture and panic and indecision, which I was actually very glad to depart from when the time came. This meant that - and it's still true - my eyes have been simply slits in my head the whole day, slits that want to close and drift off to sleep any chance they get.
Funnily enough - though nothing about this is the slightest bit funny, and I'm totally not willing to even begin to think that way - the second horrible event of today also happened while I was on my bed. I had typed up a little piece of writing earlier, while I was sitting on the porch eating breakfast, on my iPhone. On the Notes app on my iPhone. It was a part of another something I'd started before, and I was inspired by the strange weather. So tonight, I was going to put it on my computer, possibly write some more and see where it would fit in. But instead of tapping the little envelope icon at the bottom of the Notes screen, I tapped the trash can instead.
I deleted my writing.
It felt like someone died. It felt like everyone had died, honestly, or like my own soul had departed and left a dry, crumpled, useless shell instead. It felt like the world was collapsing, like all the words and stories and memories of the world were gone forever.
I moaned, and I cried, I mourned, but I didn't forget what I had just deleted. I was completely panicked, but I forced my mind to work in hyper-drive to remember all of those words as best I could to re-write it. I wanted to collapse into my mother's arms. I wanted to eat a tub of ice cream. I wanted to tear my hair out, throw my iPhone (which is new, by the way - I got the updated version) into our creek, and beat the ground with my fists. I wanted to express my RAGE. But instead, I did what a writer must do, and I....wrote.
And what came out of it is, I think, pretty close to the original.
Fortunately, I solved a TV problem in less than a minute which my parents were getting frustrated about, right after I completed the rewriting. So that kind of made my night.
The strangest thing is that one of my first thoughts after I deleted it was, "It was meant to be." I never think things are meant to be! I'm not a believer in fate (which isn't to say that I'm a believer of free will either...but lets save that monologue for another time), and I never think about things that way. But even as I wrote, the thought kept racing through my head. "Meant to be, meant to be, meant to be..." And then I kept doing what I always do, defend the easy route, and defied that to say, "Yeah, but still, I DELETED MY WRITING!"...which would bring on another bout of tears. Why I thought this, and why I am so sure of it still, is a complete mystery, and one which I shall prevent myself from trying to solve right now...at all costs. No, I don't want to think about that right now.
At least I've blogged about it.
That's not even to mention the weird weird weird weather! There's more I could tell about today...more I will tell. But now, I need to leave this world. I need to go into the world of a book, disappear into it, into a place where people don't delete their writing, and if they do...you admire them afterward if they rewrite it. (So now, I suppose, I can admire myself. In the movie Little Women, the main character's sister burns a whole book of her writing because she's mad at the main character, who has to then rewrite the entire thing. I always thought, god, I would die, how would someone ever do that? I guess now I know.) I need to go to a place where there are no iPhones without a trash you can recover things from, no sleep deprivation, no places of torture that exist within your very own little "safe haven" of your own bed. I've gotta get OUT! And I'll be much more likable when I return.
GAK, the title of this blog post is really quite menacing!
ReplyDeleteWell, when you lose your writing it really is a place of torture!!
ReplyDelete