You were moving, pretty much every day you’d have to pack your bags and move on to the next place. You’d get a new room and sort your shit, only to pack it up 17 hours later and take it somewhere else. It was non-stop. Some days you’d arrive early and get to soak up some sun or taste some delights; explore your new place and search for carbonated fizzy drinks that had a weird name or a label, the best ones where you had to no idea what the hell could be in the can, chosen only for it’s delicious looking packaging. Other days you’d arrive late, have the next day free and lie on beaches, go in boats, walk outside and see trees, plants, fields. Wake up late and skip to the shop, what treats were on offer, what’s that lady selling in the street, point and ask how much after they’d started moving the unidentifiable food onto a plastic plate, into a bowl, quickly in a styrofoam box for you to carry down the street and eat as you navigated broken paving slabs, blocked pavements, no pavement at all with the hope of not - please no! - tripping, spilling, losing, forgetting. You did this with gusto, wanting to breathe it all in, soak it up, remember it, experience it. You worried you weren’t seeing everything you could, especially in those short hours before packing your bag again and moving to a new place on the map, worried that others were seeing more or something different.
You wanted to write, you were quite sure that all of this was getting absorbed, all those jumbled emotions were being processed as you looked at a mountain, a lake, the sea, a beach, so much more than that, all so much more important than six months of a love affair with a selfish mother of two. You blamed the moving, how hard it was to write on a coach! You blamed the time - no time to sit down and write after a six hour journey, but you still had time to rush for sweet drinks, spend long hours at bars trying too hard to get a response from a pretty 19 year old who would never give one. You read, but still not as much as you should have, and you thought a hell of a lot. In the front of the brain, thoughts flew past in shapes, colours, faces, pictures, ideas, words were formed, sentences both incomplete and complete, speeches, rebuttals, imaginary responses, and in the back of your brain you took things in, let them manifest, held them there to seep into the front in full words or images, like you thought they would. But hardly ever were these written down. Sometimes the start of something would flash up and before you had a chance to unlock your phone, let alone find piece of paper, they’d be gone. Other times there would be time for you to scribble something down, and on some rare occasions you’d sit down with a pen and paper, and write. As time went on the more you did it, and the more came out, the less fussed you were about what it was. Just something, anything to help bridge the gap from the back of the brain, the front of the brain, and out of the brain. Fully filtered and then taking whatever form it became, no longer your thought, but a physical space taken up by letters and spaces and punctuation. Something that could be measured and weighed, prodded, distorted, torn up, burnt, laughed at, moved around, believed in, doubted. All of that. No matter if it started as a poem about views and news and you(s) - both of you, and ended as a soliloquy on sadness, love, nature. It was better to write something rather than nothing, better to use the time, moments, whiffs of sentences in your brain wisely, rather than not at all, rather than let it go to waste.
So it started pouring out, poems and ditties and rhymes, you started to jot these down and give them more time, let them out in whatever form you could, electronic or otherwise. Prose flew out as well, all those weird long convoluted, slightly disjointed but still well meaning sentences started to flow, in long paragraphs, longer than any you’d written in a while, some paragraphs even a whole sentence, a manifestation, surely, from the 1070 page book you had just finished reading, a perfect example of how the trees and sights and sounds were making their way out of you, but - wait, where were they? How was the easiest thing to spot the stylistic choices of the book you’d been reading intensely then not at all for the last month, rather than the kindness in strangers or the eye opening way people lived and breathed and interacted, not only the natives of wherever you were, but the young strangers from your homeland, how had none of that been processed in the same way? You saw the speed and intensity perhaps of the last two capital cities you were in, the dizzying eye fodder, whirlwind of experiences to the senses, but these people, kind ones, poor ones, sad ones, murdered ones, survivors, all of them, you got out a telescope and couldn’t spot one in the deluge of words you kept spilling out, just her or she or the million yous for the girls, all of those magical girls you’d loved, lusted, desired, cried over, gone mad for, gone mute for on staircases as you bumped into them and noticed their hair on their neck where it meets the shoulder and longed to touch it, but none of the sweet souls you weren’t possessed by. Unless, in the moment of getting out your telescope, of noticing their absence, you were honouring all of the ones you had failed to mention. Perhaps.
But you carried on, persevered, tried your best, kept yourself on the ball, focussed. You wanted it to pour and now was the time to let it. These were the moments you had and you had to use them. Keep your eyes open and ears to the ground, pack your bag in the morning, hop on a coach, get out your pen and paper and for gods sake, write. Write as much or as little as would come. Make sentences. Measure them. Measure them again. It was now, on the hoof, that was your time to shine, now the task was perfectly clear, now, now, now, now, now.
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