When I was a teenager, I couldn't stop myself from writing. It was more than instinctive: it was a condition of my existence. I carried a hardbacked notebook around with me, and in it I would scribble every thought, every half-baked idea that passed through my brain. When I had a few minutes to myself, I'd try stringing these ideas out, giving them form: they became, I guess, a kind of diary, made up of silly poems, pastiches, earnest polemics, very long letters (many unsent), opening scenes from detective novels, painfully naïve erotica, false first-person monologues.
I seemed to enjoy writing. Sometimes I would go public with what I'd written, but more often it rested between the covers of my notebooks and A4 pads. That was the space in which I wrote myself out. The 'me' between the feint blue lines was the one who almost existed — the one who took time to turn ideas into phrases, and use phrases to spin ideas.
Adulthood was approaching, and I wasn't good at much else, so I thought I'd have a stab at making a living out of writing. That's when the special relationship ended. My notebooks became depositories for contact numbers, facts, shorthand transcriptions of phone conversations. The daily glare of the blank screen wrung the pleasure out of making sentences, and every time I stumbled or paused the pressure of a deadline would seize me. The words dried up. I became numb. I lost my job.
I felt I needed a break from spewing out words, from fiddling around with syntax. I stopped writing. Several times I tried to take it up again, only to discover that words have deserted me. I don't need them, apparently, any more: I fear I may not have anything to say. When I write, it sounds false and ugly and empty.
Like an old hag, I think back to what it could be that I have lost. The answer, of course, is youth. Youth is vitality, uncertainty, promise. The me in the old notebooks writes with an eye on the future. These days the future is much clearer and closer and bleaker than it was: I can't fool myself any longer that it's worth talking to. My imagined reader is myself, twenty years ago. My imagined reader has gone. I'm too lazy, too rational, to scream into a void.
If this is my last blog, there is no need to wonder what happened: I haven't topped myself, or fallen out of an aeroplane. I just learned to exist without something I once believed to be indispensable. I lost an instinct, that's all.
