i am a real person

It is not practical for a writer (perhaps) to not travel with her laptop. It is ill-conceived and really makes me wander (yes WANDER, for crying out loud, and I began writing this without the use of capital letters, would you believe) whether I had any intentions of writing at all whilst on the go.

Don't take it, they said. Don't risk it, they cried.

Oh, but I want to write, I replied, stricken. And I am going on an adventure, I said earnestly. How can I go on an adventure and not write? That is the point, after all, of why writers do anything. For the experience, for potentially having something to write about. One day. With the aid of a computer, of course.

And I am a writer. Aren't I?

But their arguments were compelling. That I'd get tired of carting it around, of undoing the case at airport security, of questioning the security at the indeed questionable hostels, of just generally having another bag to carry, given the size of the house I was to be carrying on my back.

So I didn't take it.

And now the blog has suffered.

And I apologise.

But.

Something wonderful happened today. I was lying on my bed, feeling maybe fifty percent melancholy and other parts tired, sick, claustrophobic and indifferent. I was listening to Sarah Blasko, which was only encouraging more negative feelings (of envy and inferiority, no less), when I started writing opening sentences in my head. For what, I don't know, but brilliant, I thought. If only I could remember that or if I had my laptop here, I would then write this and this and this, then that.

Anyway, being the simple person that I am, a more jazzy number came on and I immediately got distracted by Miss Blasko and forgot all about the great novel in my head and started listening, instead, to her lyrics. Now, without posting them here and without oversimplifying her lovely words, the song is about being down and out and then not being down and out. And this, because it got me thinking about a whole string of things, like a massive ancient Egyptian necklace of things, ended up getting me excited, thinking, 'I'm a real person and I'm doing real things and I feel real things', and then I just felt ridiculously real, like I got up and danced for a bit and saw my limbs moving in the mirror, and then the next thing I knew I was writing in someone else's notebook that I found on the bookshelf by my bed.

I wrote words, sentences, paragraphs. I finished one thought, ran a line underneath it, started another one, thought of something else halfway through and turned the page to jot that down and wrote for a couple of pages (a small notebook, by the way). Didn't finish the other thought, but it's there, started, and that is close to gold. Without the use of a word processor my writing was lazy and haphazard, unedited, not criticised. You could say careless. But maybe you could say free.

Whatever. It was fantastic. And now I have all these scraps of mediocre writings that I can play with like snow (since that is what I've been doing lately and thus know how to do well). I can keep these and come back to them. It's like cooking with raw ingredients. And that's the only way cooking should be done.

So I'm contented. I may have a less cohesive blog than I wanted, and I will most likely make efforts to record an entry for each place I've visited or for each experience I've, well, experienced (still haven't kicked that sometimes debilitating need for things to be complete, at least as much as possible), but this discovery (and perhaps it is even a rediscovery, a harking back, if you will, to when I was maybe eight or nine and starting to write overly long descriptions) has tickled me.

I feel a bit more creative. Liberated. Something has returned. And I see myself not being able to not write. Whether it's on here, in a stolen little notebook, or in a bestselling novel that y'all gonna buy.