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The Courtship of Writing

Written by: Annette Januzzi Wick

@illbeinthecar

First, you are met with a warm sensation as words wash down your arm, through your pen, then leak everywhere onto the page. Forget the runner’s high. There is a writer’s high that mimics the rush of dopamine, adrenaline and norepinephrine from falling for words. Writing from your insides spills out. You scribble furiously. You have finally found what your soul wants to say.

So, you write. At all hours. You eschew affordable housing workshops and Argentinian happy hours and sometimes, even your faithful, yet always pouting, Cavalier. You only want to be with your words. You have unleashed an ardor onto the page that no man or woman has ever before been known to capture. You cannot sleep because these words sprint instead of dance in your head. You rise, and inhale the morning’s first cup of burnt beans, rush to the door and gulp in the morning dew, energized despite so very little sleep. Your thoughts immediately turn to streams of sentences that must be imprisoned that very instant. Everything is RIGHT NOW.

The fever has you in its grips, infects every part of your being. You write about three dimes accumulated in the fountain you will collect in a mason jar, about your mother and how she clutches her rosary as if holding onto to heaven, about dahlias that dance in the northwest wind. There is not one part of your life that has not now been touched by the way you are in love with words.

All too soon comes the reckoning. You share your words, perhaps online or an opinion page. Your friend remarks, “I don’t get it. Why would you say that about an onion, stripping off years of the garden’s stink?” And you fight, ten rounds with your conscience. Doubts and regrets are suddenly keeping vigil with you at night. You wanted validation, not criticism. You wanted inspiration not condemnation. You wanted a soul mate.

You are in pain and thus perform an entire scan on your body of work. You look for bumps and bruises, or some internal bleeding. Anything that would have indicated writing had consumed all of you. You turn away from the Italian Ladies desk, the yellowed, torn page. You switch off the words that have been running like a spigot through your senses. Your synapses cease snapping. You stop receiving the long-distance appeals that originated from your desk. You will no longer be accepting those calls. You disconnect.

But there comes a time, when you are pulled back. The tug comes on a night when your friends are drinking margaritas with salt or listening to a Pulitzer Prize novelist read at an ancient library. You are entombed elsewhere. You cannot breathe. You can no longer say, “No.”

You return to your love, fall in and begin the long slow waltz with words again, more committed than ever. You begin to notice your writing has plunged into the deep end. You can mine a body for aches you didn’t know were there. You write about breaths last encountered and hearing by heart, not by ear. Finally, you are ready to accept that long-held belief.

You have secured something obligatory. This is the engagement you have been waiting to happen. The life you almost walked away from.

You are pronounced woman and writer.

But then, the anticipation grows greater, the commitment more difficult to endure. You are expected now to tend with compassion and craft with care. There are others involved now. You must think of them, and what they will think. You reflect on the days when you didn’t have to care what others thought. You knew, you just knew.

But this, this is the beacon you have followed, the elusive beam emanating from a lighthouse reachable only by rowboat or swim, neither of which you will attempt on a dark and stormy night as you once did when young. And yet, you gunnel and stroke, then paddle and butterfly.

And after ten years, your pace slowed, you find comfort in a bulging waistline rounded by poetry, prose, blogs and musings. You forget how thirsty you once were for words, forget how parched you once felt when you had gone days without words swirling round. Something else has satisfied a thirst once only quenched by words pulsing through veins.

In the long stretches of winter, you roll up in a cocoon of quilts, reach for your beloved, warmed by the routine rivulet of writing that is no longer frantic or frenetic. Words that no longer poke at you in the nighttime, but carry peace to you like a cup of lapsang souchong tea. Words that rock you to sleep.