Hello.
I am a writer.
Or I think I am.
I have not written a single thing yet.
Not a story, at least. Nothing that can be properly called a story, nothing that can be counted as one and placed somewhere with my name underneath it. I have written songs. One or two, perhaps. They were only for me. I never really considered them something I had written for other people.
I have written poems too.
Under the name Inkbydusk, on a website called AllPoetry.
Those are there. They exist somewhere outside my head, which probably makes them more real than most of the things I have written.
But a story is different.
A story has to go somewhere.
It has to begin, continue, and eventually stop.
And that last part has always been a problem.
I have always thought that I could write.
I genuinely think I have the skill to do it.
I can find words when I need them. I can make a sentence sound like something. Sometimes I can take a thought that is difficult to explain and put it somewhere between a few lines and make it look as though it belonged there all along.
But none of that makes me a writer.
At least, that's what I told myself.
A writer should have something to write.
I didn't.
All I needed was something to hit me.
Not an object.
An idea.
Something that would suddenly make me think, yes, this is it.
So I waited for one.
I wondered about it.
I went around looking for it without exactly knowing that I was looking.
I thought perhaps I needed to meet new people. Maybe someone would tell me a story that would stay with me. Maybe I would hear something from someone and think of another thing, and then another, and eventually all of it would become one story.
So I met people.
I listened to them.
I shared stories with them.
Sometimes I asked what they thought about someone else's story. Sometimes I had my own opinion. Sometimes I changed my opinion after hearing theirs.
It was interesting.
People were interesting.
Everyone seemed to carry something around with them.
A story.
A memory.
Something they never told anyone.
Something they told everyone.
Something they thought was important and something they had completely forgotten.
I started thinking that perhaps this was how writers found stories.
They simply looked closely enough.
But there was always a problem.
The story would fail.
I could find the beginning.
Sometimes I could even find the middle.
But I never found the ending.
And without an ending, what was the point?
Sometimes I couldn't even start.
I would have an idea and immediately think that I had seen it somewhere before.
That was another problem.
I mostly thought that whatever came into my head was a copy of something I had read.
Even when I knew it wasn't.
Even when it was my own idea.
I had no way to account for it.
Perhaps somebody somewhere had already thought of the same thing.
Perhaps I had simply forgotten reading it.
Perhaps originality was just a word people used when they couldn't remember where they had borrowed something from.
So I kept waiting.
For something to hit me.
For an idea.
For a story.
For a reason to finally stop saying I think I am a writer and say it without the I think.
It was around August that I met her.
I don't know if that was when the story began.
I didn't know it was a story at the time.
That would be convenient, wouldn't it?
To know exactly when something begins.
To be able to point at one particular day and say:
There.
That was the beginning.
Real life doesn't work like that.
Things begin quietly.
Sometimes they begin before you notice them.
Sometimes you only realize something has begun after it has already become important.
So when I met her, I didn't think I had finally found my idea.
I didn't think she was going to become a character.
I didn't think I was going to write about her.
I don't even remember thinking that I had found something worth writing.
I just noticed something.
That was all.
Something worth noticing.
And maybe that is different from finding a story.
Maybe it is smaller.
Maybe it is more dangerous.
Because an idea can be abandoned.
A story can be unfinished.
But once you begin noticing someone, it becomes strangely difficult to stop.
I noticed little things.
Then other little things.
Things that probably meant nothing.
Things that probably meant everything.
I don't know.
I wasn't a writer yet, so I didn't know what things meant.
I only knew that I remembered them.
And then there were other people.
Other moments.
Other conversations.
Things that had nothing to do with her and things that somehow did.
I began carrying pieces of people's lives without asking them to give me those pieces.
I didn't write them down.
Not then.
I just remembered.
Perhaps that was the beginning.
Or perhaps I am only saying that now because beginnings are easier to recognize when you already know where they lead.
At that time, I still had no story.
I still didn't know how it would end.
I still didn't even know how to begin.
But for some reason, I had stopped looking for an idea.
I had started looking at things instead.
There is a difference.
I didn't understand it then.
I think I understand it now.
Maybe being a writer isn't about having something to say.
Maybe it begins with having something you cannot stop noticing.
And perhaps that is why I can finally say this without correcting myself.
Hello.
I am a writer.
And I write stories.