i write therefore i am

lately, my sister's gotten me into the habit of entering Book Sale stores and searching the racks for "good finds" at crazy cheap prices. sometimes, braving the dust mites is actually worth the risk. she once bought a zora neale hurston book in good condition for only P30 or something like that. and i bought The Horse Whisperer for P50 and it was hard bound too.

a book i bought over the Christmas break contained the words of an author i was hardly famiiar with. The Train Now Departing. that's the title of the book. it's not much for plot but the author's introspective characters got me reflecting on myself as well.

there's this one part where the character reflects on a book she's reading (in much the same way i am doing now) and she "wondered about myster writers were they all, in part, despicable? Probably....Perfectly nice people in the main, but there was that one cringing place in their souls that provoked them toward this sort of writing."

if what one writes speaks of the self, what does my writing say? what do my words say i am?

the questions floor me. and when i look at my writing, i can't help but wonder if all that my words show is a gaping hole where love used to be and which i try vainly to fill with justifications and eloquence. am i, then, simply a reaction to the forces that have come and gone in my life? the inquiry is valid enough but the implications of an answer have such destructive potential that i cringe from it and decide instead to wait for the heavy abyss to perhaps engulf these emotions as well.

in books, there are endings. not always happy but things end all the same. resolution is part of a good writer's objectives. in life, sometimes one has no choice but to leave things hanging.