Savage Innocence

It was a near desperation for most of my life.

When it began, the writing was driven by a need to record my movement through the world in exquisite and precise detail, to make my pen a camera. Even in the early years of my life I was precociously conscious of its brevity. The terror that I might forget the fragile grace of my grandmother’s skin, the percussion of my red rain boots as they burst through puddles, the bittersweet pine smell of the mountain trails we trekked so often, compelled me to preserve my small corner of the universe in words.

Some years later, but worse still, came the realization that I was insignificant and had made no real mark on the world – that were I to vanish, so too would any trace that I had ever lived and with me all that I had seen and known. So, I became a witness and preserved my testimony on the handwritten pages of journals. Not with the hope that I would be read, but because I wanted, deeply, to physically possess each fleeting moment, to capture them like butterflies in a net.

Writing became my comfort and my ritual, my method of cognizing experience. I saw the entire world through diction and word choice, through letters coalescing in my mind. The smell of a new journal, the way the black ink seeped into forms, the sound of a turning page, nourished me.

As the years passed, the writing became about more than preservation. I was painfully idealistic in my youth and filled with the enormous visions of a person who is bent on curing their world in some real and important way. I thought I could do it through words. I forgot, for a time, how insignificant I was.

I envisioned the future I would spend as a brilliant bohemian, sacrificing comforts for my art. I thought about the lives I might someday change with my words, the way my life had been changed by the great books that had raised me. I thought it was all very noble.

In the most naive manner, I fell acutely in love with the romantic persona I created for my future self: Kerouac-like, my ink-stained fingers kissing typewriter keys and the sound of them punctuating my solitude. The splendor of poetic insanity wed to a fierce quest for truth. I would become an angelic prophet fueled by desolation and jazz. I would strip naked the squalid underbelly of humanity and excavate meaning from its stench. Aloof. Ethereal. Surreal. Starving, hysterical, naked. I would chain smoke. I would maintain a drunk to ease the utter existential pain of it all. I would liberate my perception through unabashed experimentation with all forms of mind-altering substance. Naturally, like my literary heroes before me, I would die in some terribly tragic manner and far too soon.

The writing grew more earnest, then, and consumed me. No day passed devoid of words. I wrote until the words grew more poetic and more beautiful, until the stories behind them grew grand and actually terrible. I devoured literature and received a lofty education from the famed and prolific. I spent graduate school nights writing among poets and wordsmiths. I demolished my self-confidence and killed my darlings. And I wrote until there were days when the writing became more important than sleeping and more important than eating. Until writing itself was my sustenance. Until it broke me whole.

Because I was doing the thing that I loved most, I did not think much about the realities and logistics of my own life. I was too deeply enthralled with my subject matter. Nothing mattered as long as that unshakable creative illness held on.

When graduate school was over, I found an internship with a renowned magazine in the capitol. I contributed to stories, uncovered crucial research.  I watched the nation’s first African American president take office whilst working among the nation’s great political literary minds. (Who later turned out to be so very flawed.) I thought I had caught the wave. I thought, now I will give birth to revolution. Now my words will evolve into their own furious beast. I thought, now I will tame the cliches and use them all new.

Then, amidst the stark anonymity of a rural turnpike town in Western Pennsylvania, my desire made its quiet, broken retreat.

I had moved to Bedford in the dead of winter for a job as a writer on the humble local newspaper. It was the sort of town where the young get out quick and the old return to die in peace. I braved the bleak loneliness because I knew that I needed to earn my chops at the small newspaper. And because, despite the nostalgia and denial to which I clung, print journalism had begun its death rattle. (It still rattles.)

So, I wrote about the banjo shop that opened down the street, about the beloved village horse that had fallen ill. I wrote about the man who molested his foster child, about the local school board elections, about the woman lost in the forest and then found alive in the snow covered hills. I wrote the mundane and I did so without grace.

I wrote nothing beautiful and nothing brave and not because of the stories themselves. The writing became work. Prose became my albatross.

The joy had gone. It was as simple and quiet as that. Like a lover that packs his belongings and steals away in the night while dreams conceal his departure. I woke in the morning and felt the lack.

Until I didn’t anymore. (Until it was too late.)