Do something. Be someone

My mind admittedly works in a strange fashion. I make connections in my head where normal people probably wouldn’t.

I was sitting outside one night with my pen and my book in my hands, when a security guard at my accommodation at the time asked me a question that made more sense than anything else at that moment.

“Here, too dark,” he began. “How you can study?”

I smiled sheepishly at first, confused because I had no answer for a seemingly simple question. Fortunately he required none because he left as soon as he finished speaking. Then I did something I think I should do more often. I closed the book and dropped it on the table next to the pen. I couldn’t see clearly, so I just stopped. I wasn’t giving up; I just wasn’t being my usual stubborn self. I let go, temporarily of course, because I realised that when you are left in the dark, no matter what else you know there can be no real achievement of clarity; you only know half the story after all.

So you have two options:

·         Move into the light; discover the truth.

·         Stay in the dark and let go [until you are ready or able to try the former, of course].

And so it was that she was thrown into the storms of a fever. For she had arrived at the point wherefore she had started all those many years ago; the point where there was no fine line between the voice of her pen and the voice of her tongue. The voices she felt the need to document were beginning to invade all the corners of her mind and all the nooks of her life. Thus her terrible illness as she battled against pen and paper.

Her morning sun came with a cloud. She could understand his anger. After all she could barely differentiate between fact and fiction anymore. She was so engulfed by these dream worlds of her own making that reality was becoming more and more alien to her. So many fantastical thoughts occurred to her as she left her brain to marinate within the confines of her writer’s hut. What she couldn’t understand, however, was why when she found it so easy to comprehend him, he never seemed quite as able to comprehend her. Perhaps, she concluded, he was simply unable.

Her lover thundered on nevertheless, declaring his pure hatred for her chosen profession and the way it stole her away from the world.

You have made your work your life!

Work is my life!

And the rest of us, your friends, your family? What are we? Or are we not nearly important enough?

I love you all and you know this but I don’t have to choose!

Yes. Yes you do. Now you do. We can’t keep living in the shadow of your hardbacks. Just come home.

But she couldn’t. As much as she would love to she couldn’t leave until she knew she was completely rid of this disease. Until she knew she could stop lying to her friends and her family, stringing them along with words that she remembered writing then reading, she would remain here, in her mind. Here she was safe. Here they would be safe away from her and her ill mind.