Before the written word had been fully harnessed with my grubby, unpracticed fingers that knew how to write but not how to write, I was still cursing the world with my incredible, unmatched storytelling to rival the works of William Shakespeare in the backyard of my best friend’s house, sitting and not jumping on her trampoline’s smooth, UV-resistant polypropylene surface and speaking out each plot point like I was Homer himself. The characters were us, wielding only the most intense superpowers—it’s my turn to control natural disasters, you can control energy this time instead—saving the world, creating characters to fall in tragic love with, and ultimately never finishing before another idea grasped our feeble, eight year old brains with even more intense fervor.
Once the vaunted hall of Target had been pilfered and looted and conquered, I walked away with my spoils: a notebook intended for note, but instead would be for book. The notebook grew into my skin, fused itself with me, dripped itself into my veins, and I in turn nourished it, watched it grow, cradled it like a child, comforted it during witching hour. It held a story of a girl who was essentially my best friend with a fresh coat of blood, on a journey of discovery and just as much magic as could be expected from the mind of an eleven year old. Its face fell off, the swirly pattern of orange bubbles tearing away from where the spiral spine desperately kept a piece of its skin for itself, before its back was flayed alive and my beloved notebook was naked and fresh, with a handful of pages stapled together in a simulacrum of the cover and backing it once had. It was filled, kissed goodnight, and replaced with a handsome brother who never suffered in quite the same way, and could never finish our blood-covered girl’s story either.
The highschool folders holding years of creative work for business instead of pleasure were covered in video game stickers, duct tape Yggdrasil, colored pencil lily pads, its stomach full of grading rubrics still stapled to the front of papers written with the exaggerated swagger of a student with too much to prove, covered with scarring highlighter marks. These pieces breathe with dust-filled lungs next to the bottom shelf of unread books.
Now we live in the future, harnessing the power of electricity and crystals and soldered metals into portable, sticker-covered machines that can gobble up even the stupidest words from the mouth of a college dropout with nothing to prove. This mechanical angel swallowed down the chunks I shoved down her gullet, thirteen thousand abandoned words and then fifty-two thousand abandoned words and then another abandoned ninety-three thousand before she developed a battery-expanding tumor and died a horrible non-death, buried in the closet beneath the weight of all the cool jackets and coats and hoodies I wear in algorithmic rotation and look so good in. She’s still breathing in there, and I hear her in the night through the earbuds stuffed into my eardrums.
The next few years there is nothing. No notebooks with the skin peeled off, no half-dead zombie laptops begging for the end of the misery from her open tomb in the closet, no folders holding pounds of work from unspooled brain matter that never got rewound in quite the same way. The nothing swallows just as much as the laptop, the notebook, the folder, but gives nothing in return, dissolving work and words into meaningless slop that bites, chews, and digests the hand that feeds it. It is lost time mixed with a passionless job, it smells like hating yourself, breathes like a rattling, rusted chain.
The ego death at twenty-three helps. All of a sudden I realize I am both growing older and not dying yet, much to the chagrin of the teenager within me that longs to feel the sting of razors for the first time all over again, and that despite the gnawing guilt of the abandoned words I shoved down the throats of my notebooks and laptops and folders, the words will eventually come back to me. Now I have a beautiful titan, covered in kisses and colorful scraps like a raven’s nest, and she purrs with glee and opens up wide to show me every pixel of her teeth as I feed her two hundred and twenty some thousand. I realize that no matter the medium—the notebook, the folder, the laptop, the desktop—no matter the content, the process, the thoughts I know are wrong (those razor scars are kind of cool, in a way), the words will come, and I’ll hear them breathing.
