the need for writing

on why i write, and what it means to live in gratitude

I heard someone compare journaling to writing your own memoir; I’d never considered any act of creation this way. It’s been months since hearing this, and I look at every receipt saved as an act of resistance, holding on tightly to time before it runs away from you. It’s been months since then, and I look at every line frantically typed as an act of acceptance, letting the inevitable forget flow through us with love. Still more months have passed by, since I last posted anything, because I’m left stuck. I wonder, and have been wondering & will continue to wonder, why this place exists. These written pieces are a mausoleum of who I once was; my jokes don’t even hit the same (as if anything here has made any significant number of people giggle).

Why do I write? It used to be, as an act of reclamation. From time, as it moves and takes things away from me, [thoughts feelings people] and as it [not it, ٱلْهَادِي 📿] steers me away from harm [to forget is a blessing from my Lord, thoughts feelings people]. I used to write with such zeal! You’d never believe it, because I myself can’t fathom: pages and pages with writing and drawings, refusing to let things seep into me without evidence that it happened, it’s true and real (my proof lies on this page).

I’ve done so well this way! Thinking of writing as stitching a veil between myself and experience: if I write things as proof that they happened, then I absolve myself from processing or accepting them, because it is enough that I knew this existed and passed.

[Things live within me for so long, the name of a strange street from six years ago, written in a certain font, comes into my mind as I walk down that same familiar path today. The volume of a yell with my name; was it a primal scream that wanted it out? A desperate one? A howl? Nonetheless, that becomes my name now.] Even if it isn’t really to the people around me, it is, in my heart, how I feel it to be.

And there are caveats, like when this happens or who said what, etc. But for the most part, this is how my life was. Isn’t that odd? To live a life on a page?

Today, a dear one & I went to the park, where most great things happen. We walked to this decaying old trunk surrounded by a sparse grove of sweet gum trees. All of various thicknesses, there we sat; an opening of this once grand trunk, along an uprooted oak, with a thick layer of fallen leaves underneath me. When I laughed, the sound melded into the conversation that the unassuming cooper hawks were having above, hidden in vibrant oak leaves. I like to think they were brothers, joining one call after another, just as we friends found each other. On the same trunk, a ways farther ran two squirrels: one gray and another black. I sat cross-legged, balancing upon the seat, watching the squirrels crawling around the width in play. Upon hearing my echoing laughter, I imagine them exhilarated by my cacophony. A cousin of theirs sits beside us, eating an acorn that was spread by its guardian oak. I call my mom as I notice them, the gum trees clustered so close with the brush of the decaying oak branches. As all the trees and guardians do, my mom answers my call, asking on my safe return.

If in this moment, this passing tree gives life back to this ground, where the leaves are dying too, and worms find homes under them, as squirrels do around and above us, and the same with the hawks, whose calls I try to discern from the calls of blue jays, as they disguise themselves with birds of prey. If all of them are here, as I laugh and speak aloud my fears, then what’s the purpose of writing as a reclamation? Nothing was ever lost. The trees talk too, do you know? With the mycelium networks in their roots, and maybe they speak about me and my friend, when we admire their foliage as a gratitude for their company.

This isn’t an argument against, or for, writing. Nor is it to sway anyone, I just wonder why I believe I am so insignificant in the larger scheme (through whatever framework). I grant company to the trees and the birds and the squirrels, and when I speak to them I know them to be understanding. When I watch a worm get hunted by a robin, I cry. When I see the hawks grab a pigeon for lunch, I shake. and when a tree falls, even if no one was there to listen, if I am given the blessing of passing through its grief, I pray. It is good to know that I am never physically alone. That in the same way I arch my neck in stillness to look through foliage in search of a woodpecker or a junco, or a blue jay, life will be looking up or down at me. From the sky, or the soil, or the brush, an eye will be on me always.

Such is love; islamically everything is maktub [مكتوب, written], and the souls we meet in this life have known us when we were formless in the last. As I walk out of the clearing back onto the asphalt of the path, I imagine unknown blessings peeking through the branches of swamp white pines and the willow oaks & the sassafrass. I imagine a heaping expane of people I’ll learn to love, running towards my call, trying to find their way to me, as I to them, through the winding paths of asphalt and gravel and subway tunnel. How much love is running towards us I wonder? How much love did I let pass me by, without granting it right of awe: migratory birds, mothers walking their children, foliage so red it looks purple, smiles so large they call my shy glances.

Isn’t that enough? Maybe I’ll let this writing as hoarding time thing get some rest for now.

This wasn’t edited, in fact I’m refusing to read it through before publishing it. I’m sitting in a blanket, avoiding the dishes, because there was this feeling hidden inside. And because all writing is to me now, is long conversations with others, more than it ever is with myself. Nevertheless, isn’t it great? To know how many reasons I can bring, for continuing to love a thing so small as a sheet of paper?