Uncreated Conscience

There was a truth on the tip of her tongue, and she was afraid to speak lest it fall out into the open. She looked at him and would not let herself give in to the insistent pressure of those words against her lips. He was not ready. She was not ready. It hurt to keep her feelings inside, expanding the seams of her heart to a nigh-unbearable pain, but the pain of losing Raphael could only be infinitely worse.

So she would keep her truth secret and she would keep it safe until the world returned to its senses, and she would be free to feel without fear of loss.

"Evie," he said softly.

She was dumbfounded by what was being asked of her. It had been years since she knelt on the hard wooden pews of the Giraffe’s church, years since she had been asked to absorb, to translate, to understand the abstract. She had always been concerned with the tangible, the practical, the mundane; she had no use for God or metaphysics. She was a scholar of the corporeal, not of philosophy or, heaven forbid, POETRY.

I loved you, and perhaps I love you still.
The flame, perhaps, is not extinguished;
yet burns so quietly within my soul.
No longer should you feel distressed by it.

Silently and hopelessly I love you,
At times too jealous and at times too shy,
God grant you find another who will love you,
As tenderly and truthfully as I.

“I write myself into existence” [said Neesha Meminger]. She was speaking of why her protagonists are South Asian girls, but I also believe she was touching at a larger truth. I, like Neesha Meminger, like many other writers out there, write to validate myself. Because my head is a poor place to contain all my thoughts and opinions. Things get lost and muddled in there, and it’s only when I set pen to paper, fingers to keyboard, that I start to make sense. Make sense, as in make myself clear, but it’s also how I make sense of my existence, of my place in the world, of the world around me. I write to contextualize myself. And it doesn’t matter if other people read it. It shouldn’t matter if others do.

Most people ARE likeable, or go through the world with some construct of character that they hope is likeable. That's how you get through life. [...] The key with characters is to be HONEST. If a character's actions are believable, then that character will work. Notions of like or not-like become irrelevant.

The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read. Not by any other person, and not even by yourself at some later date. Otherwise you begin excusing yourself. You must see the writing as emerging like a long scroll of ink from the index finger of your right hand; you must see your left hand erasing it.