Beginning

I want to believe I am not tethered to the movement of linear time as precedent for action (reality: finally sitting down to write because the beginning of a new year made me feel like it was possible). I want to believe my choices are arbitrary, so I cannot trace them back to influence, cause, and effect (reality: being told prior to this that I am a good writer, which inadvertently softens the blow of what would otherwise be imposter syndrome). I want to believe my desires exist outside the pull and push of all that surrounds me; that once in a while these desires are strong enough to act on me, independently (reality: the blueprints of Arundhati Roy, Akwaeke Emezi, Elena Ferrante I map myself against). But I also wonder how possible this hunger for autonomy is in a world where I am so acutely aware of who I am in every space I occupy, physically and otherwise. When all the writing I have ever produced has been for an audience of some sort, I wonder at which point—the movement from self, to fingertip, to paper—some version of myself is mediated and altered to become another. Who came first? Who is true?

Writing has allowed me the greatest degree of restraint over how (much) people perceive me. When I write I can tell the truth, but I can also exercise control over how I choose to be vulnerable, and what about. I have editorial access to the voices I use to be honest, which makes sincerity a difficult thing to promise. We were once asked, as part of an exercise in school, to draw ourselves—literally, figuratively etc. I drew a bunch of books stacked one on top of another because truly, it feels like I've been made by and of everything I've read since I learned how to. Writing, on the other hand, has almost always been a process of undoing—bits of an invented, inflated version of myself that bleed into text with no room for regeneration. I don't like that I haven't been able to put into the world all that I have taken.

I want to transform what my writing can be, if for nothing else than every bit of literature that lives in the fibres of my being; for the texts that have lent me so many lives. I want this (what I might call re-writing, maybe) to be movement and release. Movement as in dislocation from stagnancy, in no particular direction; release as in letting go of all the ways writing has served me up to this point so that I may discover new ways of articulating. I want to stunt and be gorgeous and take long strides past people who turn their heads to look at me, but also bury away in the thick folds of the language I adore, despite all the violence it took to reach me. In visibility I'd like to pick words that bounce off me like light refracts against glass so that invisibility allows me to pick words that brush softly against my skin. I want to embody (stillness, foundational) but I also want to become (outward, reaching, growing).

All can be true at the same time.

I don't know what the rest of the writing here will look like or be about, but I think that might be the point. I imagine it will contain things I'm reading, thinking about, working on, etc. I know now not to promise perfection, tidiness, or anything close because my writing, just like my being, exists in endless iterations of itself. It takes on life when I give it physical form, and it continues to adapt and transpose across all the spaces it is/I am allowed into. Words are a deep form of love I put out into the world in the hope that they find tender places to rest.

When things get difficult I imagine a life by the sea and listen to this playlist I encountered by chance (#7 is my favourite). In my dream world there are no sounds of the city and there is so much space to breathe. Everything moves slowly. I can read and form art with my hands and make meals that aren’t rushed or pretty. I lie on the sand with the sun on my skin and no object, material or otherwise, interrupts the length of my outstretched limbs. They keep stretching until I can tuck the entire sea in the crook of my arm and my footprints are valleys with streams of glitter flowing through. I am tall and powerful but also gentle, and eventually I eat the sun and become it. Light shines out of every pore and orifice in my body and on my head rests a curly crown of glory. People stand in the glow of a tenderness that no amount of harm has ever been able to take away from me.