Already Gone

I wake to late afternoon sun; there should be moonlight.
Outside, the air is still and warm but the leaves have turned gold.
As in a dream I walk around - looking at things, touching things,
and gradually, I come to know that I’m not really here.
The house feels empty and silent.

The things that I love and use, are all here.
The chairs, the table, the lamps, the incomplete tapestry in the corner.
All stand as though waiting for me to pick them up.
Everything looks exactly the same, but everything feels different.
There is a smell of age, of dust, of sadness.

Slowly I wander, remembering the springs and summers of my time.
Somebody still lives here; I feel the emptiness in him as well.
And yet there is peace here. It emanates from everywhere and makes me smile.
I wonder if he smiles any more.
Does he remember what it was like when I was here?

All is as if I am still here.
But I am already gone.

Brittany Kingston
© Monday, January 30, 2006

Write, Write, Write

That's all there is to it really. If you're a writer, you write... and write... and write.

You slave away over a hot keyboard, cutting, pasting, rewording, checking spelling and grammar... Practicing and perfecting your art in the hope that one day you'll become a recognised, well-loved author. Computers are wonderful creatures, aren't they? We work with whole blocks of text now, instead of just one line. Whole pages appear, disappear [sometimes without our permission], and reappear in other parts of our novels in the blink of an eye -- or the click of a finger.

I remember my old typewriter days. I wrote a complete novel on one. Tedious. Laborious. Frustrating. Those are just a few words that come to mind. However, those were the days I was thanking my lucky stars that I had a typewriter. It was state-of-the-art. It was electric. It had a correction tape. Yippeee! I could correct my errors as I went. I thought those days were heaven.

The alternative was pen and paper. Ugh! Just the thought of putting pen to paper in the mechanical, muscle cramping, medieval ways of old gives me the shivers. We've come a long way.

Now, writers talk about disks, cds, dvds, memory sticks. We email our work all over the world and keep in touch with people we never see in person.

But the one thing that has never changed is that writers write. They don't just put words on paper. They create worlds, people, feelings, emotions. And they are driven to keep writing against all adversity.

Can a writer stop writing? No. It's always there. Even if it's lurking beneath the surface, it's still there -- that urge to create, that urge to get the words onto the page.

By that definition, I am a writer. So are a lot of my friends. None of us are household names yet, but we're hanging in there, writing, writing, writing...