Set Fire To The Past


Musings / Monday, January 11th, 2016

Of late, my posts on this blog have become less personal. I am sometimes scared, seeing Google Analytics, and all these people who are visiting this blog, to writing what I really feel. I wonder why they would want to read about my life. Its mundane happenings. Its pointless wanderings. My own pitiful bleat. I wonder if they come away with anger, bitterness, or that rare bit of happiness, warmth, or understanding after reading this blog? Or do they just run away? I am especially scared of my sister, who might think I am perpetually depressed after reading my posts, and drag me to the nearest counselor.:-) So, I have been moderate. Writing without really expressing.

I feel that I have written less honestly over the past few months.  A writer’s job is to sound his or her barbaric yawp over the rooftops of the world, to paraphrase Whitman. I haven’t been barbaric enough. I haven’t written with freedom, with candor, with the desire to pour out all the thoughts in the paper cups of my mind to this screen. To just watch the words burn because they were stinging me. You should scrape raw the words off your skin. It should hurt to not write. It should write to hurt because you know it wasn’t good enough. And you go back and write again.

So, over the past few months, I have watched the slow dissolution of a friendship I thought was indissoluble. I cut my thoughts, wound it up inside a cuckoo clock in my mind, and warned the cuckoo to never coo its sorry march of time. I wrote stories. Fiction instead of writing about my life. Life is liberating inside someone’s life. Especially, if you can weave with words the power to recreate the fictional world anyway you want. So, I wrote stories. I didn’t write mine. “Shit happens,” friends advised. “Learn to move on,” they say. As if I was standing in a place, obstructing traffic. And where should I move to, I wonder. What does that phrase even mean? It indicates an impatience with the past. Move. Keep moving. Whatever you do, don’t stop. Move. Move. “Don’t hold on,” they urge. I look at my hands and wonder what they are holding on to. Loyalty? Trust? Faith? “Let go, let go, let go,” they whisper. In meditation, my thoughts turn crazed circles. I watch them all, dancing little circles on the mind’s stage. Just observe, the meditation gurus advise. So, I do. These days, I do what people tell me to do.

Let go. I will. Sit still. I will. Observe. I do. And somewhere, I tell myself that I will listen to myself again. I will write this story too. The story of my self. Because that’s what I lost over the past few months. My self.

For now, I was reminded of Adele’s “Set Fire to the Rain,” song.

‘Cause there’s a side to you
That I never knew, never knew…

And I think, let it burn. Let it burn. From the ashes, from the embers.

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