The Fear of Writing.

Besides my loathing for pulp fiction, there is one other reason why I haven't dared ever to write a story. And though there is no way I could filter one particular reason from a body of unwillingness and outright lethargy and exhaustion, here's how I would like to try.

Every man and woman has a center of their being. It sounds rather idealistic, but there is one idea, one solo thing, that makes you who are, binds bone to bone in your body and makes you walk around on your two legs, be the phenomenon that you should be. And that idea, is beyond everything, almost everything, indomitable, uncrushable. It only has to rise, like a snake from your navel to your head.

Every damn story that has been written, that I have found and read, has reflected with honesty, its writer's intricate bonding with her this idea. The process of writing a story is like an endothermic reaction in which the writer comes to be, this person that she should ideally be, doing justice to the words she is scribbling across pages, leaving her footprint in every single stanza, every comma pushed between words, every semi colon inserted to space out one thought from another.

And I have no such idea, haven't discovered mine yet. Or may be I never would. Because I am constantly looking. I begin a paragraph by writing about a couple that lives in the middle of the forest, an unknown bird that sits by their window every night, a girl that's waiting for her roommate, how the wind blows today, how the clouds are strewn across the sky and likewise. And then, after a few hundred words, I am drained. Exhausted. I run out. Of thoughts. Of all conceivable fiction. Of all routes, that could lead me to become the person I should ideally be. The person my story wants me to be.

I am cowed down by embarrassment, humiliation of not being worthy of my own reading. And I tear apart the papers, roll them into a ball and dump them in trash.

I have seen the noble ideas that make people write, drive them to finish pages after pages. But in my case, there is no such.There is no spiritual snake rising from my navel to my head. I am blank, except for the empty center of my being. Which is soaked, soaked with lovelessness. And a terrifying solitude, which began as a disappointment, soon became a sorrow and has now turned into a writhing anger.

If I ever write a story, only this lovelessness will be scattered across my pages. And therefore, I shall not.