One

Once upon a time, there was a girl who wants to tell stories.

And so she picked up a pen, which according to urban legends, is mightier than the sword (okay, it’s really because pure steel with ruby-studded handle was heavier than she thought), and set out the treacherous path of looking for Tales.

Obstacles abound, but that was really a mark of a road worth taking. She thought, anyway. Not too deeply though, lest she bump into the lair of Logic and Reason, who thirst for dreams like a baked sponge thirsts for moisture. Dreams were all she had, and have her insides sucked dry would be a tad dampening – or in this case, the exact opposite – to her quest.

And it’s not like she didn’t have other problems already. She had to wade through the icy Waterfall of Collective Doubt from Others, ride – or at least, maintain upright most of the time – in the Whirlpool of Filial Guilt, survive the Delirium of Premature Confidence, hack through the Tangled Vines of Darn-Who-Am-I-Kidding, only to run headfirst into a wall.

Who put the effing Writer’s Block there?

But seeing stars was worth it, once the bleeding subsided, because she did find Stories. In fact, they were pretty much all over the place, if you knew where to look. Some required digging (for politics is a lot like potatoes; it powered the masses, albeit tastelessly), while others you picked with ease, and still others even needed you to do the planting first. There were also those suspicious-looking ones which were jumping up and down desperately to be noticed, and the obnoxious ones that were shoved down her throat simply because they have the purchasing power to buy, err, whatever that is the poetic equivalent of Advertising Space.

So, Pen in tow (or rather, several pens, with the hope that one of them would work), she Wrote.

And then she stopped. Got lazy. Got blind. Got swept away by Life and its Smoulder. Got impatient.

Got stupid.

Writing became merely a pain, a past, a possibility, a perished pride. The blank Microsoft Word page and beckoning prompter is a blatant reminder that her mind was not what it used to be. It is no longer a fertile ground for Words to flourish. Even the bad puns shrivelled, and she had a lot of them.

It is a rocky terrain of a conscience in there, and the jagged hardness give the sloshing brain cells a pretty bloody time. She can only deal with so many howling synapses at a time.

The saddest thing of all is that she stopped looking for Stories. Or rather, she stopped bothering to pick them up. She let them go. And went they did.

For example, the picture above was a street violin player she had the honour to bump upon in New York City. She was just hurrying past with her sister and brother-in-law, when the violin player yelled a question.

“Which country are you from, guys?”

“Malaysia,” her brother-in-law answered, while the patter of their feet grew more urgent.

And then they stopped.

And turned around, mouth agape.

The violin player, with a kind of smug nonchalance, was playing “Negaraku” on his violin. Tone perfect. There was no music sheet in front of him.

“But how--?” they asked in disbelief.

The violinist shrugged. “I like to study the national anthems of different countries.”

The brother-in-law tipped the violinist. They walked away – she with considerable difficulty, seeing that she was trying to kick herself at the same time, for not asking more questions, for not pursuing a Story when it was sitting right in front of her, for being stupid.

Inside every writer there is a story-teller wanting to come out. Mine did, but has, it seems, lost her way in the dark.

Sigh, now where did I put my flash light?

****

And because projects really only mean something when you get right down to doing it, the nonsense above managed to see daylight. This is my first post for Project 52, a writing/photography commitment that HafutotaJE and I are going to undertake (yes, we are ill-advised. Thanks for trying, though). Basically, we upload a picture we‘ve taken and write something, anything, about it, once per week for a year.

Yes, we are still the same people with deadlines/kids to chase and closing week to conquer and procrastination to overcome etc etc. You can tell that sanity and rationality have never been our strong points. For some reason, that is HafutotaJE’s charm, and my demise. Life is so unfair.

Join us in this joy ride if you are ever so inclined. Oh, but do bring your own sandwiches.

And drop us a line if you are hoping on, so that we can also go drool at your stuff ^^