I obsessively ripped detail off my words—places, technology, streets, monuments—because I wanted them to stay out of time. It was important to me. Perhaps, it was my only fixation. It was a conscious decision then not to name the town I grew up in, to not tell you about the world around me at all. If you wanted to know more about the world, you would not be sitting here reading these words in front of you, trying to escape. I respected it.
This often pushed me into a corner. It was difficult to write when you could not just pick something off the news to craft a few words around. Craft—I hated the word, primarily when writers used it. A craftsman followed instructions, an artist defied them. I was none of them, but if I were to choose, I’d prefer to defy. While I was stubborn, I was not naive; I was convinced this fixation was the sole contributor in only a handful of people ever knowing about my work because, in my preference to avoid the world, I often seemed apathetic towards it.
It was irrelevant to me, however, for I never wrote for anyone else. I did not even know if I was a writer, really. I could string a few words, and sometimes, I made sense. I believe it was more habit than the urge people prattled on about when they talked about writing in their little clubs and forums, talking about changing the world, grossly unaware of their privilege to be able to spend afternoon after afternoon talking about the world and its ailments. I wasn’t any better, of course, but I preferred to keep the irony limited to myself.
Writers who talked to other writers about writing were rarely writing anything at all. It was a hill I chose to die on a long time ago. I had no reasoning for why I put my thoughts down as regularly as I did, why I continually jotted broken sentences and phrases down as I went about my day, or why I pondered over so much when I had no intention whatsoever to try and affect most of it. Maybe, there was still time for me to find answers to the countless questions I decided against listing after three. It had only been about ten years of writing; three of doing it properly.
Writers have bled words for far longer than I have lived.