Why Do I Write?

 

Some people dream in color, others dream in black and white, but I know for a fact that I am one who dreams in words. They fall like stardust, those words, one after another tumbling from my mind, trying to arrange themselves on a blank page to somehow express the intangibles in my life. They are my containers for thoughts bursting to get free from my mind- ideas that I must leash in lest they float away like colored balloons against a gray sky, forever lost.



I write because I must. There’s a burning desire inside me to capture a moment in life, to express an epiphany in its most eloquent and honest form. I feel an urgency to articulate the little details and nuances that make all the difference to me. I see clouds and gaze at them for hours because the idea of floating towers of vapor intrigues me, and to have such mammoths of the sky pass over me is an adventure in itself. I marvel at the suppleness of a cellist’s left hand, the way the hand delicately adds vibrato to a note before jumping down the fingerboard with vibrant strength.



I’ve climbed onto the roof of my elementary school and brought a notebook with me to write about the deflated tennis balls I found there: an untold story in itself. The startling peacefulness I found there inspired “The Roof Walker,” a short story I wrote to show people the barren and cracked tarp up there and the way it smudges black onto the soles of their sneakers. I want people to feel the wind playfully snatching at their clothes, to smell the aroma of stir fry floating across their nostrils from the restaurant down the block, to experience the way they can close their eyes and lose themselves in the exotic world of rooftops, the thrumming of traffic and life below them distant all of a sudden.



What starts out as a scrawled thought, a tiny thread from my mind, soon becomes a work of art, a thin slice of my life framed in sentences and paragraphs. I dream in words to rest assured that they will still be there even after I wake up.