Writer's Fire [March 2006]

Sometime between highschool's end and my sophomore year of college, I lost my writer's fire.

It's always been like this - an inconstant flame of words and poetry. It flares incandescent-hot for days, weeks, sometimes months before life events distract me from its tending. Then, the last fuel consumed, it gasps and sputters, guttering flame fading to sullen embers beneath the ash and char. The embers sleep, forgotten, just enough to support a lifeless essay or lightless ramblings. But always I rediscover it in the whisper of pages, and I coax the embers to full flame, dip my pen in fire and write with the blood of stars.

I've lost my passion. Words were once my breath, and tales my heart's pulse. My identity: "I am a writer; it is what I do and what I love. To stir souls, dance dreams, bring worlds to life with words..." I knew, of course, that I couldn't make a living from it, and so psychology was my second choice; food and housing and helping people, and writing in my spare time. "Counseling by day, word-magic at night, poetry and stories and epics and books."

I never guessed that studies and shattering paradigms would so consume my time and energy. All my words targeted reality, all my time became devoted to discerning truth from fiction, horn from ivory; my writing was essays and journalings, words without fire, drawing only on sleeping embers and logic-mind. No time left for creation.

And now I read, and can only envy. My writing muscles are flaccid with disuse; I stare disbelieving at an 8th-grade cub whose raw fanged imagery far surpasses anything I could pen now, and even my best of years past falls short. Why try? mourns the dankness in my head. Average isn't good enough. Can you ever be more?

"Writer" fades from my identity, leaving just a strange lost girl scratching words into wood, grasping at the incoherancy of dreamdust.