Dedicated to George Orwell … my favorite author ever.

It is not very usual for me to get up one morning and realize what I should do with my life. But it did happen once.

I had a flair for writing ever since I was a kid … well, I wasn’t an English teacher’s all-time favorite, but I sure knew how to not let any emotion ever come on my face by draining them out it in my poems. So I went on writing and was surprisingly appreciated, a lot. Now, I do not know how many of those “appreciators” actually ever read my poem, and even if they did, how many of them interpreted it the way I do. But they somehow managed to bring me to the stupidest moment of my life. I was asked to do what I would have never brought upon myself … write a novel. And naive as I was, I began on it.

But writing prose was way more difficult than writing poetry. Poetry is inherently beautiful we do not need to ornament it, but prose … well allow me to discontinue this topic here.

Though I realized this fact a long ago, I somehow never gave up. Now as a result I lie in my room amongst a bunch of papers. I had three unfinished novels, countless incomplete poetry stanzas, and an exhibition-able heap of fungus-struck, moth-eaten, semi-crumpled papers. Some of them even have some mysterious orifices—I have no idea why. My room had more a look of a fine arts graduate rather than a literature student, though unfortunately, I am neither.

That was my last year of school and I had given up on my passion of writing already. But when did an end of passion ever mean end of an addiction? Even my nightly chants of the “Serenity Prayer” didn’t seem to work. I had again decided to share my thoughts with the night and the papers rather than with any living mortal soul.

I noticed a strange syndrome grasping me back then. I was suffering with phrase-demasiado. Now you won’t find this word if you googled it because it doesn’t actually exist, but this exactly describes the situation I have been in. Phrases had crawled all over my life and now were walking all over on the unkempt pages upon which I wrote. Yes, I had a phrase obsession. I could never complete my sentences. And perhaps that was the reason I hated writing prose. In poetry we can leave stuff unsaid. I hated talking to people for long durations and I hated to make sense while talking. I used to leave all that I began to say incomplete. My sentences often began with a conjunction and ended in a “…….…” I remember one of my English teachers telling me that we should never use more than three dots in an ellipsis; or at least that is what the people at Modern Language Standards (MLA) insist. But isn’t an ellipsis supposed to mean an unfinished thought? So, what if we choose to think for long enough and not for just the duration of three frivolous dots. Now if anyone from the MLA is reading, could you please make the standards a bit more flexible for all other phase-demasiado people like me?

This self-found and perhaps self-written mental state of mine took me down, a lot. And all those memories of my bad English grades started to haunt me yet again. I stopped writing. And my craving for it had to be succumbed under an unreal world, naïve desires, trifle discussions, academics, and novels. I felt like the Hunchback of Nostradamus, sitting all by myself in my self-created world of gargoyles at the top of a bell tower, deformed and unfinished while all else below were generously endowed with the art of expression. I waited for my Festival of Fools to arrive where I may for once mask these unfinished thoughts of mine under the need of a broken conversation or an enticing suspense. But I was unaware of the fact that a long dry spell had set, and that no Festival of Fools will occur hence. What I did know was this spell doesn’t seem any near to an end. Others used to call it a writer’s block I simply termed it as perdition. And I am not waiting for a resurrection.

I won’t say I hated the lack of words or the need to talk to myself while not being laughed at for it. What I occasionally disliked though was the inability to create my own fantasy world and escape into it, even though only for bare moments. And more I missed doing so the more I had started to hate the real world, I felt strangely trapped in this strange disillusion. See now I am at a loss of words yet again. I do not know how to tell the story beyond. Or perhaps I just do not know how to make the transition.

I had once read somewhere that it is not difficult to express oneself we are honest enough. So let me be honest with all here, perhaps it was not so much about the writer’s block; it was about myself. I was too afraid to break my illusion that no such fantasy world exists in which I try to escape while writing. I was afraid to accept things I write as figments of my imagination. I was afraid that one day I would wake up to realize what I want to do with my life and that may not be as fulfilling as writing even two lines of a doomed-to-be-incomplete poem seemed to me.

I think we all have been through that phase at a point of our life. The only problem being, some of us are never able to get out of it.

Aaahhhhh well … I am stuck again. Hence, to be continued …