Sumiko Saulson

Sometimes I wonder if I made a mistake by pulling it all out and writing it down in the first place. I wonder if I would have been better off leaving all of my girlish notions about what love is in the back of a drawer full of dusty things that you know you’ve grown too old for.

But we do what we do when we deconstruct and reconstruct all of our cumulative life experiences and all of the things we’ve read and seen, the stories we were told, and who we believed we could be when we were still young and the world hadn’t broken our hearts.

Those of us do who write.

We do these things to construct a character.

So you find yourself opening some locked-away room in the back of your mind and bringing out dozens of old photos of love and loss you’ve kept hidden in some musty chest in your cerebral attic. You remember some person you used to be, some passionate person who was so easily affectionate and so entirely unafraid. Then you wonder if you are still that girl. And you wonder what you can do to protect that girl from becoming a dusty old woman who makes safe choices and is afraid to dream.

You wonder where the intersection is between staying safe and dancing barefoot in an empty street skating around the detritus left behind by easy lovers and broken glass, the shattered remains of empty beer bottles and boys that you loved who are now just friends. And boys you loved that you hate now. And boys who became men, sometime long after you kicked them out of bed. And you wonder, could it have ever been different?

But then you look in the mirror, and you know that you’ve spent too long in your worlds. You’ve spent too long with your own words. Now you find yourself alone, holding your own hand. You have finally arrived, to save yourself. To love yourself. To comfort yourself. To reassure your body that you still do and always will love her, and remind her you will probably be the last lover she ever knows. You listen to your stories, and you laugh at your jokes.

This goes back and forth for sometime, until you’ve written a book. It’s a love story you told yourself. You cry when you crawl back out of your world, and you enter the everyday world where you are no one special. You are not its writer, and you do not solely determine its outcomes.

And you’re falling, and you’re hoping, and praying, you’ll land somewhere. Somewhere soft, with a friend.. who knows, and understands.

And you wake up so grateful for both of your fans.

~ by Sumiko Saulson on December 8, 2014.

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