What would you do if you could not write?

Where would it go? Where would all the thought, emotions, observations go? Would they fall by the wayside, forgotten? Would I implode with the bursting pressure of them, like an over-stretched balloon? Would my words die if they lost the immortality of being stained to paper? My writing is pain and passion, love, laughter, family. Would that cease to exist if I could not preserve it? I compare it to a soul. The soul is eternal. My words, my thoughts are eternal. To not write them down is not to say they never were. The air would thicken with the pregnant tendrils of my forbidden words. Unable to be contained in paper, my thoughts would simply drift away, eluding me; they would not die. But like the loss of a soul, it would be an agony to endure the separation.

(written 9/5/08)

Forget

I wish my mind was a tape recorder. I wish it was practical and socially acceptable to carry a notebook with me everywhere I went. To write as I think and document my every thought. To capture observations, put life’s minutiae down to ink and paper. Thoughts like gems, given permanence and physical evidence of their existence. Not retreating into the recesses of memory, forgotten.

The wastefulness of forgetting is a gnawing presence. I want to imprison my impressions of the world. Lock them up, freeze them forever, never forgetting. But I can’t. My thoughts are not gems for safeguarding. They are water, they are sand. They cannot be held in the palms of my hands. I forget, I always forget.

And then it's gone.

(written 9/4/08)