Beneath the sheets of paper lies my truth: writing fiction

I think I was always a writer, always wanted to be, just didn´t know if I could.  Either way, I wrote mentally long before I actually started. It´s a common thing among writers, I guess. Not trying to be pretentious, but I once read an essay by George Orwell, where he mentioned that, he was always creating stories from scenes of his everyday life. Because that´s where literature exists and breaths. We can be heroes, just for one day, a song by David Bowie. And that´s true. Literature is happening everyday around us, we just have to be aware. In a way, a writer is like a photographer. We need a snapshot, a sparkle that triggers the creative process, and then we continue from there, we create new lives.

 I have several of these in my mind, mundane things, faces that passed me by, sentences I´ve heard, colors, odors. I can´t help it, it´s something I´ve done without even noticing. I am always collecting memories, and I keep them stored for an occasion I can use them.  

There´s also music. Many of the stories I wrote came from lyrics I´ve heard, songs I love. Listening to them helped me creating situations where those songs would be playing; a break up, a love scene, or something completely different where a certain part of the lyrics fits perfectly. It is incredible, exciting, and almost magical. All of a sudden, I see the characters, I visualize the plot, I hear their voices, and then I know; It´s time to let the process flow. I have to tell that story.

The stories are not mine. Not autobiographical, I mean. It always amazed me how difficult it is for readers to understand that. I don´t want to write about my life. No way, that would be boring. Citing Orwell for a second time, but I think he must always be mentioned, good writers are invisible. It´s the story that counts and that just reminds me of Oscar Wilde and one of his brilliant sayings, I guess he was thinking about poets, but it is valid to all writers: the good ones are pale figures, really insignificant. Why? Because they´re not worried about being, they´re busy creating.   

Once the story is there ready to be read, it gains its own life. What a wonderful thing that is, giving voices to characters, bringing them to life.   

As I said, I always wanted to write. I never thought I could, though. But one thing about writing is that it is a hard-wired condition. Writers are born writers and one cannot escape or ignore this urge for too long.

Once I started, I could never stop. I just finished my first book. Sixteen short stories. Slices of other people´s lives, ready to get known by others, probably very few others, but that doesn´t bother me.  

I love what I do. And I do cause I love, I cannot live from what I write, but then I remember Monterroso. For him, getting paid for writing was something surreal and almost indecent. Anyway,  I am truly myself when I write, and that reminded me of a song by Regina Spektor, “beneath the sheets of paper lies my truth”. That´s exactly it. 

Wishes

I was in the kitchen preparing dinner, when my youngest said: "mom, I don´t want you to change".

When I took her plate to the dinning table, I asked what she meant, and she answered: "I dont want you to get old, cause you´re so beautiful. If you get old you will look less beautiful". I just smiled back.

I´ve been thinking about your request, sweetie. And, as much as I wanted not to change, this is simply not possible. What I am today is slightly different from what I was yesterday,  and you probably look different as well, I can tell. A new tooth is filling the gap left from the one the tooth fairy took last week, and that is just an example. You gonna turn seven, you learned to read and write, you´re facing your fears. You were so happy to finally learn to swim, and you want to sleep alone, in your bed.

It´s impossible, because we live in different times. You´re the future, you look forward to what will come. I am the past, I look backwards, in a search for things I left behind. And that´s not either good or bad, it is just the way it is.
Right now, we share our presents together. Right now, I am your beautiful mother, the most beautiful woman you know, and that´s very sweet, especially because all daugthers think their mothers are gorgeous, and that´s fair enough, I´m very pleased you see me like that.
However, I know this will not last. Not only because time will pass for me, but mainly because it will pass for you, and I am sure you will grow up to be a very good looking young woman, and by then, when you´ll look at me, you´ll see a different person. Older indeed, but that wouldn´t be so important to you anymore. You will see me with a critical eye, you´ll spot my ugliness for the first time.
I know it´ll hurt, for you and for me, but it´s part of life. You will understand someday.
So let´s enjoy our presents together. Let me be your beautiful mother, and you, my seven year old girl.

Oscilate Wildly

Smiths has been my soundtrack on the last days, and of all the songs I love, the one that brings tears to my eyes is Oscilate Wildly, an instrumental one, and the reason behind that is that I already have all the lyrics in my head, lyrics of a huge number of sad songs. And also because I live to write, something I once describe to a friend as a curse, altought at the time I said that, I just wanted to sound clever. But after wondering a lot, and also after reading a novel by Javier Cercas, I´ve came to the conclusion that that´s what it is, a curse. I go around in a constant search for a good story. Nothing is insignificant. Everything can be used somehow, someday. We´re vampires of others people´s lives, or lives that we just made up from a snapshot we get.

I thought about that when I saw a picture on monday, of a Free Syrian Army fighter playing with a dog (LINK). Since I saw the picture, I couldn´t stop thinking; who was this man? what are his bieliefs, how was his life before this gruesome war started, and I thought about the dog, about their accidental encounter, and wondered if they both make it to the end of that day. And also how was it possible for this man to ignore the background, the killings, the destruction, the gassed victims, and enjoy the company of a dog on a sunny day?

Maybe the answer is in an essay by George Orwell, A Hanging (check HERE). Because we happen to be alive now, at this very moment. Because we´re alive up to the moment we´re dead. On this essay, Orwell describes the day he witnesses a hanging. The prisioner who´s going to be hanged walks in front of him, a walking dead. There´s a puddle on his way. What does he do? He steps aside. For what, one could ask. To avoid getting wet,of course, altought it may seem absurd. To me, the main reason is because he can step aside. At that moment, he is still a living creature. Avoiding the puddle reinforces his humanity. He does it, because he´s still alive.  
The man plays with the dog because they´re both alive in the middle of chaos, death and suffering. Others didn´t make it, too bad for them. Escaping death brings a furious happiness, something both Orwell and Cercas mention. We will keep on stepping aside puddles, playing with dogs up to the moment we cannot escape.

Bubble

When I was a child I remember watching a movie about a boy who lived his entire life inside a bubble.  I think the main character was played by John Travolta. It was a drama, because the thing this boy wanted the most was to leave his sterilized space, so he could interact with other people. He wanted to touch and to be touched by others. However, I have this belief that bubbles are not that bad. In fact, the only way to keep things going sometimes is to create one around us, live inside a limited perimeter, isolate ourselves from others, and I just remembered a song, that has been happening to me very often these days, a song by REM, I´ve read it was elected the saddest song ever written, and I think is unfair, Everybody Hurts, a song about resilience. Anyway, it is a fact: everybody hurts, but we can read this in two different ways, right? We can get hurt and we can hurt somebody. And we usually get hurt by somebody´s actions or words, even unintentionally. But I think the boy from the movie was either too young or too naive to know that.
There are the others and there´s us (and  by us I mean you, and me, as individuals, separate ones. As you may have already noticed, we - you, me - are basically alone and that I´ve got from a song by Andrew Bird ). The others are usually too worried about themselves to notice what´s going on around them. Because that´s the way we are in general, we cannot see the world from a point of view different than ours. As in that expression, as much as we try (and I guess we never bother to try hard enough) we can´t walk in other person´s shoes.  So, in a way, we´re all inside bubbles pretending we´re not, minding our own businesses.

But another characteristic we humans share is this unexplicable faith in the future, a place we never get to really know. And then we keep on holding on, as Michael Stipe tells us to do, hoping for the day we won´t feel hurt anymore.

    

Shreds

Depression # 1

It just happened, I was in my bed, in the dark, alone, trying to sleep. As it happens to all kids, I was afraid of the dark, but the nightlight was even scarier, It had the form of an elefant, it was yellow, a yellow elefant shining in the dark, a creepy thing, so I didn´t want the elefant. I was in the dark, fighting my fears, the monsters that were around trying to bite my feet, and all of a sudden, the attack came from the inside. 

What I felt was a bigger than life fear. I think I had a panic attack when I understood what a long time after that, or I should say before, but I read years later, Camus has defined as one of the absurds of life, which is, we simply die.
But the fact is I was a child, I had no idea of who Camus had been or writen, although I have to say, once I got the chance to read him, I had this feeling of identity. As crazy as it might seem, I sensed I met an equal. But that was long after that night and, again, I was, like all kids are, unaware of so many things, that I couldn´t fight that feeling with rational or even irrational arguments. I felt helpless.
I don´t recall much of that night, but I do remember the feeling, the awful and permanent sensation of being helpless, and of knewing by instinct I would say, that there was no way out, no solution. We die, it´s a fact.
So I kept that moster inside of me, while I felt his attacks on my flesh for a long time, or maybe it wasn´t that long, but when we´re small, the time seems to last forever.
And I remember my second encounter with death.
We lived in a house with a huge yard, or I thought it was huge, I don´t know. One day, while I was playing outside, I found a dead gecko. A curious thing about childhood, at least mine, is that I didn´t fear animals of any kind. I guess it´s a natural thing, atavic to our species, and even to others, to experience in order to learn. Anyway, Geckos are quite cute, and wonderful creatures that can climb walls. I used to catch them by the tail, and the funny part was to witness one of the wonders of nature: geckos can get dettached from their tails, and escape predators. Most of the time.

The one I found couldn´t escape. I felt sorry for it. Ants were attacking his body, trying to get pieces of its flesh. I got a shoe box and put the dead body inside. I wanted to dig a hole in the yard, but all I had was a small plastic shovel, and the soil was so hard... I did my best to bury the box, but the hole was not that deep. So, on the next day, I went back to the spot of the burial, and realized my effort was in vain. The ants were there, finding their way inside the box, inside its body. So I tried to cover the box with plastic. It didn´t work as well. Death cannot be defeated.
One night, my father found me crying in despair, alone, looking for a way out, knowing already that I wouldn´t find any. He asked me what was wrong, but I couldn´t tell, I just couldn´t. He wouldn´t understand, that´s what I thought. So I lied and said I dind´t want to grow up.  I remember my parents trying to convince me everything was fine. I tried very hard to believe. But I knew that was a temporary thing. Death cannot be defeated.