It’s getting easier to write again. Ideas are coming a little more fluidly, and aren’t quite as straining to develop anymore. Perhaps there’s been an excess of inspiration in the last while, from the music that keeps me moving, to the people I interact with, to the temperature of the season, to the words in the books that I’ve been reading with relish.
I can never seem to get it all down.
Sometimes it feels like I’m waiting for inspiration when I write. Like I’m waiting for a specific mood, or a specific song to come on and guide me through an entry. Lately, that inspiration seems to avoid me. I keep trying to write about things that I feel I should write about, instead of the things I want to write about. Every time I search my head for the proper mood or mindset, it’s only memories that appear.
And they surface like photographs, each one a still frame capturing an experience, expressed in sound, warmth, light, and odour. I’m on the streets of Hong Kong again, surrounded by people, browsing through the knick-knacky stores with the heat of the sun soaking through my shirt. I’m skating on the Canal, mapping the imperfections of the ice as I glide across them, the night sky burning with the orange of winter. I’m wondering through the mall of my hometown, enjoying the strange familiarity of a place I frequented so long ago, hoping I don’t bump into an ex. I’m in uniform, clutching the lapels of my blazer, as I step out from the heat of grandiose wooden doors into the snow-washed quad. I’m on the bus to New York, trying to figure out which passengers are coming or going, wondering where my own journey would take me.
I fight against these memories, trying to write about something more relevant. In the end, I write about nothing, and I can’t fight against it anymore. I have to write the things I want, inspired by the things I think. I have to let go one more time.
From myself, instead of others.
I used to seethe, stew, and marinate. If I was in a bad mood, I wanted to stay in a bad mood because, somehow, I would want to make it worth it. I figure that if something is bad enough to make me sour, I shouldn’t be easily taken out of that frame of mind. It’s the same with forgiveness. I’m slow to anger, but once I’m there, I’m extremely slow to forgive, for the exact same reason.
For years, I would listen to music to help me wallow in these emotions. It would cradle me, fuel me until the emotion burned out. Listening this way, with a surge of sentiment, would let me feel the notes, and I would savour every second, minute, and eventual hour of it.
Lately, though, I hear music differently. It inspires me. It moves me. It helps me out of an emotion, instead of into one. And it feels like this change is a reflection of how much my life is changing now, how I’m beginning to see the entire world around me in such a profoundly different way.
As if everything that’s past is prologue to this.
In ten minutes, the redness of the sky and the morning fog are gone. The day resumes.
Sometimes, living just means being at the right place at the right time.
“Is Petersburg really as you draw it?”
“I draw it as I see it”
—Onegin
When I woke up, it was just another day, and my room resumed its silence as I turned off my alarm in the darkness. When I got outside, it was just another morning, although the recent drop in temperature has frosted the grass and turned the pavement white.
When I got on the bus, the sky started with a plain, early-morning glow that seemed to stretch out in a tunnel towards my destination. As I traveled further east, the sky turned pink and red, and a perfectly vertical beam of cloudless light shot out from below the horizon, letting me know that the sun was waking up.
I watched the sun rise as the bus took me to work, watched the sky turn from grey to red to yellow to white. I saw the heavy morning fog snake through the trees of a forested green golf course, and saw it recede, as if the earth had chosen to display itself by lifting her downy veil.
There are days when I want to get off at every stop and take pictures of the graduating atmosphere. When the ride is a journey only experienced by bus.