lingual

Recently I traveled to my hometown.
I must have chronic amnesia about this place, because I always convince myself I miss it, that when I go back there’s going to be nothing but nostalgia awaiting me, and then somewhere around my exit off the toll road I run into my past. It waits for me on the off ramp then leaches on to my soul, sucking me dry of any hope I had of a pleasant walk down memory lane.
I have a love hate relationship with my teenaged self. I would imagine she’d feel the same about me.
This last time I was home was especially difficult for some reasons I’ll only be unfairly vague about, but during my time there, I decided to confront a part of my past that I actually COULD come to terms with—all the crap from my childhood still in my mom’s basement.
For years, there have been boxes stacked on the unfinished side where everything left of me from my birth until my wedding had been packaged up, like brown cardboard re-gifted presents that would only have meaning to me.
I decided to sort through them, and by sort through I mean throw most of their contents away. If cable television has taught me anything, it’s that if I hold onto old books and board games too long, eventually I’ll become a hoarder.
I condensed all these boxes down to one, which in the end, was mostly filled with paper.
Letters. Pictures. And a lot of stories.
I remember as a child that I always liked writing. But, it wasn’t until I went through all those boxes and sifted through twenty five years of memories that I saw how many stories I’d written in my life. From the barely legible scratchings from my first grade essay on “my pokit” (pocket), to my fifth grade vocabulary assignment where my characters lived in bubbles under the ocean, to my senior year creative writing class poetry, to my junior year in college novella entitled “Miss Tennessee” that earned me an A+ (a grade I didn’t think existed in post-secondary education)—I read through the maturation of my own personal brand of storytelling.
And it was the one part about myself, my past, that I can honestly say, I love.
And not because all my writing was great, because it wasn’t. A lot of it, actually, was pretty terrible.
However, the parts that were good—that I can look back on sometimes decades later and still think were good—serve as an outline of my life. Even as a child, I feel I was honest in my writing. Sometimes to my benefit, many times to a fault. But honest still.
I tried to write my first novel when I was six or so. It was called “The Balloons in My Head” and, though I didn’t know to call it that at the time, it was a memoir. I felt the need early on in life to document things that happened to me, forever fearful I would forget as an adult what it meant to be a kid. This fear probably stemmed from not feeling understood by most of the grownups in my life.
I kinda still feel that way.
I accept that this fear is also the root of my passion for photography.
But anyway, as I’m reading all of these former writings, I’m in the throws of writing this novel (that I continue to write today… slowly…). I remembered with a lot of joy the process by which I wrote “Miss Tennessee.” It was based on Michael Cunningham’s The Hours which was based on Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. My character, Miss Tennesee, was written into their already existing story lines.
I had approached my professor with my idea to do this since what I had in mind didn’t fit any of the criteria given to us for the assignment. He granted me permission, and I went to work.
And it was invigorating.
I remember feeling so powerful as I crafted the story. The words flowed out of me as if the story I was writing had always existed, and I was assigned to be its teller.
I remember feeling as though I was plucking the words out of the air and slapping them on the paper. That they were true words, not ones juxtaposed into an order I created.
And when I handed in my assignment, I knew that (for once) my grade didn’t matter because I had written something good enough for me. I had been true to the story.
I am striving for this daily with my book. And some days, I get there.
Sometimes, when I’m writing, I feel as though the story is writing itself. That the words are controlling my fingers on the keys instead of the reverse. That I’m discovering what is happening, and I’m just surprised as a reader would be.
I feel aligned.
It’s not so different than then I’m listening to a worship song and I feel a connection to it so strongly that I’m positive the music is coming from within me and not being absorbed by me. I swear at times I feel as though I might “speak in tongues” through all different media… that my (really terrible) singing voice would suddenly burst forth with heavenly melody, or that I might scour my house for a paintbrush and create a portrait well beyond my talent, or that I may capture something in writing whispered to me by something much greater than I am.
It’s in these moments that I experience that anything is possible.
I feel that there are languages beyond what we speak.
I want to be in the conversation.