Life is awesome when you write for a living!

“I write for a living,

as in, I live a little every time I write.”

I have lived with fading keyboards and papers, blank canvases and brushes, a mind full of thoughts, heart full of questions, and a lump in the throat for as long as I could remember. Since I was little, I questioned. Perhaps because I lost.

I didn’t take poetry seriously until I had to. i.e., when I lost my mother. You see, I was raised by a mother who loved reading. I would spend all my days at her office. The library to be specific where I would read a book in a day. When I’m not reading, I am on a typewriter which nobody used. I would write about everything and don’t even look back. My mother, being my number one support system would collect and keep my writings for me. I write, she reads and keeps. The protector of my passion that was yet to be born.

Fast forward, it’s now been a year since I lost my mother. I haven’t written anything. I would recite a poem and each come would out hoarse from having lived too long in my heart. In fact, I started studying Construction Management and Technology, running as far away as possible from ever loving something. It wasn’t until one night, I dreamt of my mother for the first time since her passing.

In my dream, my mom sat in what looked like a cave. She looked cold. Since my mother was a true form of an angel in human flesh, I somehow expected I would meet her out on a greenfield all in white. You know, like in the movies and all the books I have read. But no, she was in a cave. And the conversation went like this.

Me: Mom, does it hurt, you know…dying?

Mom: No, it doesn’t

Me: oh…okay.

Mom: Read me something you wrote

Me: I haven’t written anything in quite some time

She looks even sadder.

Mom: You should read me something next time.

And I woke up, in a warm bed, alone. And I wrote a poem about it years later. Saying,

“Daughter, read me your latest piece”

My mother said
“You know they say you are as good as your last work” she added
Then I smiled
Thinking of the last thing I wrote
Nothing.

Her Pain; Her Pen

After having dreamt of my mother, I spent the years after that writing and writing nonstop. I felt a lot. And all of it went to my paper or anything I could find blank. I used a lot of metaphors and wrote in a third person so my family wouldn’t know the poems aren’t necessarily about me. There is a lot of pain. Lots of questions. Lots of confessions. Lots of goodbyes and I’m sorrys. Many asked, “Why do you write?” …and I went on and wrote a poem about it.

“Why do you write?”

Is the equivalence of “Are you okay?”
That’s why my fingers stutter all over my keyboard

I wrote for years. When I couldn’t write I painted.  My paintings weren’t worth a thousand words. In fact, they were silent. Too silent. Paintbrushes helped me brush out all the thoughts crowding my mind. And so I painted. But I always wrote. With or without words. I never got the chance to read any of my writings for my mother. But at least I wrote.

Her healing; Her Pen

11 years after. I am now a poet. In the way, I live. Have you ever met a happy poet? Like a really happy poet. Yeah, that’s me now. Over the years, I have felt all the sadness that I needed to feel until I fell in love. And I stopped writing. Because my pen has always been driven by my pain. My pen only lived a paper at a time. It did not know of the future. And now it writes, of pain but in the past tense.

Here is another article that explores the benefits of poetry.