Words in My Mind

I can’t clear my head. I’m sitting here and I want to write, I want to tell a story, I want to say something worth saying and I know it's there, I know I have it in me but I don’t know how to get to it. How do I make what is inside come out. When I imagine myself writing something truly great and truly powerful and truly impactful, the words come bursting out of my chest like some pulsing geyser, frothing about all over the place, all over the page and the computer screen. A mess at first, but then the words arrange themselves in a way that is so perfect and logical and illogical and fun and oh so beautiful.

Oh so beautiful. It reminded Alec of that line from the musical Sweeney Todd. His thoughts interrupted, he once again began to listen the older couple next to him. The man was going on about his genetically deficient extended family who lived south. Apparently other than himself, the man’s family was filled with people who were either stupid or fat or lazy. Sometimes all three. Alec literally jerked his head back and forth to shake out the distractions. I came here to focus; to write something that I believe to be true, Alec reminded himself. It’s what I promised I would do, what I need to do. Okay, I wish that the words inside would erupt up and outwards, messy at first, but beautiful. Right, onward…

And the words have a power all their own. And they leap off the screen and off the page and stretch themselves out longer and longer until they go through the reader’s eyes and into their heads, wrap their coils around the brain and squeeze themselves into every crevice and every ditch and color the synapses to even change how the mind works and thinks. The words are transformational. They don’t stop, they slither their way down the throat and into the heart and from there inseminate themselves to every part of the body, hitching a ride in the veins and arteries, racing through the body so quickly and violently that they knock the reader flat on their back. The words fill up the body and the mind and the heart and once they have possessed the entirety of the physical man or woman, they begin to work on the soul, they transcend that grey and mysterious and terrifying cavern between the physical and cosmic. And now the reader does not only feels different, but they are different. My words have changed who someone is, so inspiring those words are.

And now the words, circulating through the very essence of individuality, work their way back up the throat and along the tongue and begin to seep out between the reader's lips. Just a little at first, of course, but then the trickle turns into a drool which turns into a walloping spit, which turns into a full-blown gastric spew. And the regurgitated words are messy at first, because the reader still struggles to discover what to do with them - the reader has barely even digested the words themselves -  but they recognize that the words are so powerful and so important and so beyond anything they have ever seen or heard that they have to be shared. The words have to be studied, not skimmed over like the first two chapters of virtually any textbook you read, but meticulously picked over and explored and until every nuance and lesson and moral has been gleaned, and even then, just when you think you've found all that can be found in the words, you realize, once yet again, there is more and more and more and a whole other dimension to the words you had never considered and the study of the words must start all over again. But you don’t mind because you love the words so deeply, because they have transformed you so dramatically, and so you relish the opportunity to spend more time with the words that you love and quiver in eager anticipation to be with the words once again.

Read, reread, reread. My words as I envision them overpower the very will of the reader and - unknowingly at first read - capture and enrapture their future, for as they read those first sentences and paragraphs and chapters and volumes, they unknowingly submit themselves to an addiction from which they can never achieve sobriety, and of course nor would they ever want to, because the words are an opium without negative side effects, they only make life better and never worse. They only inspire and reveal beauty. My words help the reader recognize reality and realize ideals and show the narrow pathway from the former to the latter.

And so the words come bursting forth out of me and I write them down and they are read by others and they worm themselves deep down inside of the reader and swirl about in their very being and once again find themselves bursting forth in a chaotic spray; its unexpected and uncontrolled and frankly messy as hell, but one of the most alluring and radiant and beautiful things I and the reader have ever experienced. The pure, visceral, animalistic reaction to the words I have written will be more expansive than the very universe itself and more intimate than the most miniscule protozoan. The words, their intake and rerelease, is such because it is nothing more and nothing less than the unmatched, unrivaled phenomenon of an unfiltered, unedited reaction of pure innocence and childlike wonder at the experience for the first time in a long time, or perhaps the first time ever, of something that is pure and something that is true.

And as they discover and rediscover and rediscover my words, their responses and replication become more practiced and finer until it is no longer a monstrous spewing, but the design and brushstrokes of their own masterpieces. And now their words and their pictures and their compositions, now they inspire, for at this point I am likely long dead, but they inspire and inspire and inspire until we have filled the entire universe with beauty and truth and, even when its ugly and it hurts, everything will be real. And I will live forever in these expressions which can never be any less loving than the most they ever will be.

In short, I want my words to touch people. I want my words to inspire. I just want my words to be seen. I just want my words to come out. Where are you truth? Where are you beauty? Where the fuck are you? Come out! Come out of me. Fill the page. Fill the screen. But they don’t. And they won’t. At least I don’t think they will. They haven’t so far. Not really, only in fleeting moments. A paragraph or two at most. No past evidence to predict a future of leading the world in a never ending journey for purity. But I know they’re there. They just need to come out. Come out of me words! Come out! Come out!

Alec almost could not breathe when he finally stopped typing. He sat in his chair, panting out short gasps of air. His fingers had never flown so swiftly or so in sync with the thoughts streaking though his mind. He read quietly to himself and then reread in a whisper what he had just written. It was messy and even incoherent at points, but it rang true in his mind and to his ears. The words he had just written touched him in some way. Possibly because, he thought, it may be the very first thing I have ever written that is not simply descriptions of what a character is wearing or what they are doing, but something that expresses a very real sequence of feelings and thoughts and emotions.

It was not much, he knew, it would take many more words and pages to fill an entire novel, but now he knew he could do better. He could be better. And that knowledge alone gave Alec more confidence than he had ever had that he maybe he could make it in this world as a writer. Maybe he could accomplish a work of significance. Maybe he could do something and be somebody the world would remember. As he contemplated these things, Alec thought how nice it would be if he could simply fall asleep now with such grand thoughts and fantasies floating about in his head. But he was too wired to lie down, too excited by the rapid pulse and flow of his creative juices.

And of course, he reminded himself as he looked up from his laptop, I am sitting in the middle of this bookstore café. There across from me still sits the middle-aged black woman highlighting her textbook. Behind me still sits the Asian girl watching the zombie television show on her computer. The cute dark-skinned girl with the hair still stands behind the counter at her register. The older couple to my left did leave though. I wonder when that happened. They had been holding an interesting conversation; it’s too bad I missed the end of it. The man really was a decent storyteller.