Of writing. again.

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Writing is a lonely thing.
And by that I don not mean anything sad or negative.

To me it comes in solitude, in being alone, in being by myself. It comes, when I am not thinking of the menu for the next meal having just ingested one. Or how to teach my daughter three-lettered words which she can spell but seems to be unable to read out.
Writing comes to me when I am thinking of my days at home as a school going kid. it comes to me in the silence of the house. In the warm, humid afternoons when everything is sluggish or appears to take on a drugged effect. it comes often at nights when my body id not tired enough to be able to sleep as soon as my head touches the pillow.
It comes to me in the loo when I am dreaming up situations. At times it comes alongside the memories of school and college days and people from there. Stories. Some very short. Some long journeys.
Some come from looking at the shape of clouds, shielding my eyes from the glare of the sun, which like a strict teacher is taking me to task for doing something that I should not be doing.
Some stories get lost. And I have often hunted back in memory and time for them but till now have never been successful in retrieving a story that has been lost to the constraint of time, sheer laziness or being in a dreamy state.
I never developed the habit of storing or saving anything that I wrote and I regret it immensely. I threw them pages and pages for the fact that I thought that they were useless before anyone else could take a peek and decide.
To sit down and write is a consuming thing. I do not want to be recalled back to this world when I am writing. I want to stay with the characters. It it were possible I would write in one breath.
I barely edit what I write in this in-one-go fashion. Maybe I am scared that if I return to them I will bring them harm or maybe I am just exhausted after having written what has been on my mind that I can't bear to take a re-look. And I have not saved stuff from years before to be able to go back to it now.
So, to save me stories, I have started to mail them to friends I think, think that I might have some talent in putting the words together. The number of such friends is three. (Does that say a ting or two about my friend making ability? Hmm..)

I don't know if they have read it with a critic's eye or just sifted through it but I know for sure that in their custody they remain safe. Their opinions mean a world as they are the people I don't feel shy of in baring my soul/ pen / keypad to.

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