Unread

My blog posts come in floods and droughts. Sometimes I'll write three huge posts a day, then I'll go a week without thinking of anything to say. Today, I have a lot to say. I guess writing in general has been on my mind.

I wonder how i get into writing so much in a day in the first place. I see a movie (or a kdrama :D), or listen to the same song over and over for several hours, or I draw, or I just sit and do nothing. My thoughts wander, and suddenly they're whipping from subject to subject until I can't help but write it down.

Well, that was stupid.--I usually think that once I'm done. What exactly am I going to do with this piece of paper holding a jumble of words attempting to bring light to my jumble of thoughts? I wake up from a dream in the middle of the night and i jot it down on an index card before I go to sleep. The next morning I wake up to see that my writing is terrible and makes no sense when I'm half awake: "puzzle pieces. dead sister. CREEPY uncle. Stuck in darkroom." When this is the first thing I read in the morning, with no memory of my dream, my mornings are blessed with the wonder of how I wasn't traumatized during the night. -.-"

It doesn't really make sense, it doesn't really take me anywhere, and NO ONE is going to read this. But instead of recycling it like a good citizen, I stuff it in a folder somewhere, or in a notebook. The index card, or the post it, or the scrap sheet stays there, for a year, two years...three years in the case of the letters I found today.

hm.. maybe two and a half years. But the time doesn't matter. It was just a long, long time ago. They were simple letters, from the summer after freshman year, addressed to different friends. They made me snort in embarrassment when i read them, and I re-stored them in the small notebook I found them in. Why the crap did you write that? I asked myself. You never sent them. And they're about such cheerful, inconsequential things. Being stuck at the airport, sitting next to a girl talking loudly on her cellphone with her friend about when she's going to get her next spray tan, eating McDonalds in a small room because your flight was delayed for FIVE HOURS. Why did you write that? For the people you wrote it to, those things meant nothing. I can see you knew it meant nothing to them, because you never sent them, you never dreamed of showing them to anyone. what a waste of time.

But I'm glad I wrote them. When I wrote those unread letters, i guess I ended up writing them for myself. Fifteen-Years-Old Dianasaurus-Rex wrote them for Seventeen-Years-Old dianej. For me, this type of writing doesn't just tell me about my crappy experience at the airport. It doesn't tell me about being worried about making friends at summer camp. It doesn't tell me about being mad at my mom for putting Terry up for adoption. It tells me that the two and a half years I thought had slipped through my fingers were actually a long time--it had slipped my mind that I'd been holding those years in my pocket this whole time.

Writing doesn't have to be read. I don't think that's its only purpose. Sometimes, writing is perfect unread by foreign eyes, just sitting still on a sheet of gaudy stationery paper, flattened by time and an old notebook.