See me, but do not look at me.
Keep reading then leave a comment or chat thread to join this dialogue. [From the Archive.]
I am a writer. I want you to see me, but I do not want you to look at me.
I want you to learn the contours of the letters that move my life, my soul, not the aging outlines of my face and body alone. Does that make sense? Mentally? Psychically? Emotionally? Philosophically?
I want you to understand the aches I feel beneath my skin through the words I use, not judge them from afar with superficial digital lenses and pens deep within the shadows.
I am a writer. You see?
I want you to connect with my inner voice. Not because it is mine. But because it sings a similar song to yours — a melody of meters and tones and lines and syllables, together in harmony. I want you to see what makes me me, what makes me see the colors of the world I am compelled to paint in rhymes and prose, so you can see what makes you you and what you need to portray with words that continue to flow into and sketch this ever-evolving work of human art that belongs to everyone and no one at the same time.
I am a writer. You see?
I want you to masticate on my words, swallow them, consume them, then regurgitate them into something phenomenal that is all your own yet made of similar nutrients I ingest. But I do not want you to devour my words, that do not really belong to either of us, without savoring them, tasting them, feeling them within your body, your bones. Unless you are not hungry. Then please, leave them plated for someone else to enjoy, for their nourishment instead. No harm, no foul.
I am a writer. You see?
I want to dance with all the allegories and imagery waltzing around my mind, which is full of all the idioms and phrases and symbols and inner expressions of others I have heard and read over time in real day-to-day life. Their beats lingering within me long after they are seen and felt on the page or not, pursuing the rhythm of the steps in my lines. Or is it the other way around? As I twirl around the clichés and undefined characters and plot holes scattered across the floor, then dip into tangible metaphors.
I am a writer. You see?
I live within the world of words I am building with alliterations and analogies and aphorisms and ambiguities and themes, etcetera, marked by all those who came before me. All those I was able to accompany across time and space when I read, and when I read. My work is only one brick in the wall they helped configure too, so to speak. A continuous stack of mysterious paradigms glued together by grammar and authenticity. Parts of a language wall erected to say I was here, and you were here. Not to keep others out. But to keep them in the universes we write that are permanently emerging in ink then forever linked.
I am a writer. And it is an oxymoronic thing to be. Living in this constant state of wanting to be known and really seen, as you have seen, others and literal and figurative marks they have left behind yet simultaneously wanting to remain forever anonymous. You see?
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