The Story that never flew away

On a late evening train, in the middle of flickering lights and dim shadows, senseless aspirations and impossible dreams, subtle rhythm and repeating groans…the ignited cognition had scribbled its first attempts of fiction on a blank paper:

“The feel of the leaves of the pomegranate tree sent a feeling of strange happiness through me. I was in the pomegranate orchard, all by myself – away from my impatient mother. I sat under the tree although the young tree did not provide much shade. How long I sat there – I did not know because soon I had drifted into a deep sleep, away from the bitter events of my life.”

It was one of my first stories. I was fourteen.

Imagination was young, and alive. The heart was untouched by thoughts more confounding than pure wonder. Why I wrote the story, I do not know….but I would have probably allowed the whimsical tale scribbled on cheap paper to flap away with the winds. It would have been another incomplete thought, wasted emotion escaping through the window of the train into the yawning void if my mother hadn’t persuaded me to hand it over to her.

I looked away, ashamed to show my face to her as she scanned my beginning struggles with story writing. Thoughts that had been trapped within my mind were staring at the world through the rusty windows of a speeding train. When I worded them, it was some form of insane liberation. But that knowledge was supposed to have been my little secret.

To be honest, I never regarded my stories in a favorable light. I wrote them to pass the time. And then mindlessly threw them out of my brain or available open windows. I made them paper-planes, allowing them to fly to heights that I believed my words could never reach. That story should have been discarded.

But it had passed many hands instead. Several eyes read through them.

I was the girl who imagined vigorously, but always allowed it to die down. I never considered my thoughts worthy of an intelligent audience, because they sounded so bland and ordinary….even to me. Being the highly de-motivated, self-involved and hesitant high-schooler, I assumed that life would always throw my stories out its window…..unheard, unvoiced, and unnoticed.

Unworthy of attention.

When the author herself rejected her own words, carelessly dismissing them, who else would find them more appealing?
But a phone call had come, with the warmest sort of encouragement I have ever received for the story that should have flown away….If it wasn’t for him, I wouldn’t be writing this 100th post today.

This 100th post wouldn’t have happened if my grandfather hadn’t praised a pathetic attempt at fiction by an unsure, hesitant teenager who hid all her imagination in the last few pages of school note books, and the back of her fantasizing mind.

Stories would have been voiceless, mute and ordinary…if not for the magic that ignited the writing fingers.

That magic, I’ll call faith.

His faith in me. My parent’s encouragement. Silent stimulants. Blogging has changed me, in more ways than one. It has become part of who I am. It's become my story.

It has 100 chapters to it today. I never thought it’d grow to such proportions. An Amateur’s Attempts is the creative oasis where the anecdotes that should have swept away, the secret notebook pages that should have fragmented in paper mills….have been safeguarded.

They have found voice. And a very appreciative audience. Thank you all.
I’m glad for my blog….my respite, my oasis, my identity. This blog is like my little beanstalk...a growing strand of an evolving thought process...cherishing, remembering and chewing on all that has been, is or will ever be...and I am extremely indebted to my readers.

The teenager who didn’t know how to talk wrote these three years ago:

"I have been labeled as a girl who doesn’t talk, and that is a natural trait of mine. Or I was labeled so. You see, this girl is talking. She can now talk through her writing; she is finding new means to express herself. I have realized how deeply there was a need for me to talk, and all those emotions, thoughts, feelings that I had bottled up, memories that I had stored over the years are pouring out. I am not the same girl anymore—something is changing, it is something that is very difficult to define….."

Back then, I didn’t know what I was………or who I was going to be.
Much of that still hasn’t changed. The truth uttered that day by my frank immaturity still holds.

I still don’t completely understand why I feel such a great need to write.

But all I know is that it allows it to let go and set something free. It allows me to express like never before. It allows me to become different people---The shy dreamer who regards the world in quiet wonder, a sensitive adolescent who turns irrationally emotional, the pseudo-philosopher when completive, and a frenzied poet who is overcome by a maniac enthusiasm to play with language….and often the casual writer who simply translates feelings to words.

It allows it to be……me.

(Thank you for reading the stories that would have flown away. Thanks for all the support, love and encouragement. Special thanks to GVK sir for so whole-heartedly making me a member of MBP. And of course, everybody on Mysore Blog Park for being so supportive! A warm thanks to all of you!)