Early Attempts

Writing is hard.

Hard for me, anyway.

Which is terribly ironic, since i am, in actuality, a writer.

Always have been.

When i was a little girl, i wrote fake newspaper articles. I would write one main article and then fill up the rest of the sheet of paper with ads, weather reports, and j0kes.

I wrote a short story about fairies called "Dance of the Nymphs."

I wrote bizarre recipes for things like Coffee Lettuce Cups and bread made from bricks.

I wrote a novel entitled Victoria of the Violet Meadows, a direct rip-off of my favorite story in the whole world--Anne of Green Gables. I wrote it in pencil in a five-subject notebook and cut out pictures from catalogues to glue in for the illustrations. I filled that entire notebook. I even started to write the sequel, Victoria of the Sparkling Lake.

I wrote fake letters from a girl named Kari who was in a concentration camp. On this i was particularly confused, thinking that the camps were in Russia and/or Yugoslavia. And Hitler himself would come to the camp almost daily and feed the prisoners things like stale bread and mealy apples. I also wrote a short story about a woman named Maria who was from Yugoslavia and who went to Russia to work as a prison nurse. On this i was confused as well, since Maria's mother packed her a lunch for her trip to Russia which consisted of fried chicken, biscuits, bananas, spice cake, and milk. Of course when she reached Russia the landscape was barren, dark, and gray, with only a few lonely meager trees. All of the buildings were white and/or gray and all of the people were harsh and forbidding.

I'm not sure why i was so taken with Russia and Yugoslavia, and why, if i was so taken with them, i didn't attempt to learn anything about them.

Ah, but you see, i didn't need to study about those places. I already knew them. They were there, in my head, along with the fairies and the recipes and Hitler and the newspapers. I lived so fully in my imagination that it never occurred to me that what i wrote may be faulty. Indeed, accuracy was not the point. The point was simply, to write.

Perhaps it was all of the years of drinking all night and taking too many drugs that deadened my imagination. Those drugs took me places my imagination alone could have never traveled to. And of course, it never should have. Those are not places i was meant to go.

And so, somewhere along the way, in those places i always wanted to see but should never have traveled to, i got scared.

Scared of people. Scared of failure. Scared of dying. Scared of....easy to say life here, but that would not be the truth. I certainly wanted my old life back. The easy, dreamy life i had lived before drugs and parties and too much alcohol and no contact with your family and black candles and tombstones by your bed. I had been Anne of Green Gables in the flesh before all of this. What would i have given for one more afternoon of traipsing naively by the creek with my best friend who was as silly as i was. What would i have given to stand in front of the church and sing a bad song that Marie and i had written and were so proud of. What would i have given to again be that girl who had no fear of what others thought or said about her.

But that girl seemed to have disappeared irrevocably.

Until God brought her back.

As much as was left of her.

And now, i sit here, trying to write. Trying to think of how to bring more of that girl back. That silly, ridiculous, laughing girl who just wanted to hold hands with her best friend and pick flowers and steal fruit from the tree down the street and write novels by the lamp late into the night. If only i could think of something to write, maybe i will truly become her again!

Or maybe, i've been her all along.

Let's wait and see.