It took me a long time to love to write.
It used to be for the fun of it all, writing about talking fish and girls named Samantha, illustrating short stories about gummy worms with washable Crayola markers instead of doing homework, racing the clock to see how fast I could churn out a limerick about a blueberry tart.
5 minutes and 43 seconds, by the way. A record I would break with a poem about puzzle pieces.
Writing was the gemstone I had hot-glued to my forehead—it sparkled and entertained, shining over the clinking silverware, occasional throat-clearing, and incessant small talk of an immigrant gathering. When Payal aunty asked how Neeti’s daughter spent her free time, Neeti nudged me slightly as I straightened and told Payal aunty that I wrote. My mother beamed with the shine of my poetry. It was funny. It was cute. It rhymed. She liked the way the light reflected around the room, the way people would notice and comment and praise.
She told me to like it, too.
So I did.
And then I grew up—life extended its hand and I foolishly shook it; my eyes widened as I was yanked every which way, stretched too thin to stand. Soon, writing became a furious process, ink spilling, lead snapping, pencils sharpening until they were mere nubs in my fist. Notebooks were filled, Google Drive folders organized by 14 different colors, and fingernails bitten to the skin as I desperately tried to release myself from a deathgrip, hands bloodless from the pressure. Sentences flowed red from the scars on my wrists and the rust-coated swiss army knife I was forced to lock in the drawer beside me.
Writing was my soldier in a war with myself. Its shield was meager. My mind was stronger. And yet, the words won.
I now have no choice but to write. I write with the reverence of a follower to his master, placing each letter as a blessing on the page. I write with nostalgia toward the patchwork quilt I helped my grandmother make in India. I write with the audacity of a child holding a pen and a latex balloon animal and claiming they’re an author, their experience a feather on the back of a peacock’s wing.
I write like a disciple, the flashy gemstone evolving into a coveted heirloom as I worship words through the cracks in my keyboard and the worn fountain pen that I found in the parking lot of my highschool. I write because there is an urgent need within me to taste the unseen colors of the world around me and paint them on pages for others to discover. I write to document the way whipped cream melts on my sister’s nose and the way it hurts to watch my mother cry and the way they sky seems too good to be true on nights that are too good to be true because there’s an alternate world in which my life moved on before I knew how it felt to be truly alive. There is a parallel universe where my mind won. There’s a version where rust bled into my veins. I write because writing saved me. And maybe it can save someone else, too.
My mother now shifts when she reads my writing. Sometimes, she doesn’t move at all. I poke her to make sure she’s still alive. It takes her a while to say something. She says she loves it, the way it is unapologetically a broken girl who is sifting through her father’s toolbox and hammering herself back together with the force of a lion.
She tells me to love it, too.
So I do.
Sole Magazine