On the missing pages

Writing for a living was for large parts of my childhood a dream. Eddings, Tolkien, Jordan were my idols - their writings the wind upon which I sailed. My own pen and paper the sail.

Life though, has its way, and as is custom, we rarely stay true to the course we set as children. The decisions of others, and ourselves, the reef we steer towards, or away from. Those revered childhood heroes, who unknowingly fuelled my fantasies, slowly faded, not from memory, but in import. The goal changed, though not the effort.

Through the crises of my early 20s - ever unemployed, even homeless at times - my creative efforts slowed to a halt. Then, seemingly from nowhere, gainful employment, a move abroad, friends full of life.

In less than a week, I went from unemployment benefits and a family exasperated, to a life full of adventure - in a foreign country to boot. Through it all, somewhere, somehow I recognised that keeping a record of who I once was carried something of importance - and so I kept trying, paying for a domain rarely used, with funds better spent elsewhere, promising myself that, yes, I would one day continue.

No longer do I aspire to join my childhood idols as their peer, but instead, perhaps I might strike a path of my own.

As a child of the Alphabet and of the differently-minded, where fear of the unknown and abandoning an idea are concepts as alien as are aliens themselves, the aspiration stayed, in the back of my head, safely tucked away behind a wall of feigned indifference. Meanwhile, the lines long thought parallel were not, in fact, so.

Trauma takes time to process, and as I oh-so-slowly began to unravel the neatly packed coffers of my youth, an awareness began to spread. An awareness of a will - not to live, though that certainly does exist - but a Will. An independence.

I mustn’t do anything. But I can.