Why I Write

NONFICTION

by Brionna McDonald 

A question to ponder, it would be a lie if I said I hadn’t already formulated thoughts around this question as I attempted to dissect and interpret myself, but I never had the certainty of language attached to it. I’d never dived deep enough to have a question attached to a slowly slinking, gnawing why? I had thoughts and feelings behind words like ‘reason’ and ‘purpose’ and I wrote them down, all swirling around and touching on the edges of this question. I felt to write, and I wrote to feel. Feeling, because that’s what I was receiving from writing, right?

Sometimes the ‘madness’ strikes when I’m sitting alone, or walking to class, or taking a shower- and suddenly the dots connect. I’m sent into a memory or a revelation or epiphany where the puzzle pieces fit together. I like making it make sense. Then I scrawl it onto the nearest scrap of paper or into my notes app.

My love for storytelling has two origin stories, I would say. One that's more innocent and exciting and another one that’s diminished over time to a slow beating baseline. Although both of these are true, I hope I can achieve the joy and excitement for life of a future I had when I first began to write. I hope I can find the dream again.

An Exciting Introduction: Stars and Stripes How I Love Thee

Innocence. White, pure innocence like all the other good school children.

But I was brown then. I was brown because I went into the sun, playing by myself in my imagination. I glorified my loneliness, to be honest- through infinite stories and a sister too old and ashamed of me to play with me. Only later, when we both got a little older, was I brought out for entertainment, I was odd enough, weird enough, and my mind spacey enough. I was fun until I wasn’t, I was good until I wasn’t- a common theme. I would be shut down, turned off, and put away until I was of convenience to love.

I was brown because I wasn’t afraid to be before I started coating myself in sunscreen and hoping I wouldn’t reach the too-dark quota for the summer which lay on the threshold of not being too dark to become ugly, where all the browns of my face meshed my features plain and ugly. Brown eyes. Brown hair. Brown skin. The brown that would show up in my school yearbook photo, as a reminder for the rest of the year how dark I was. I was darker than I remember in photos of my youth because I didn’t notice it at the time. Until I started becoming aware of the comments, ‘You’re as dark as the dirt in that photo’, a pantomime paint swatch reminder to myself to never be that color again.

Now, in retrospect, I was never that dark. There's a varying range of colors. My mother is Southeast Asian. I am not.

But I stood out in a sea of white faces. And I was a patriot among them, I loved them.

I wrote because I had a future. I had a future filled with stories, to fill up the spaces of our new home. As soon as I picked up reading and learned to write English with my number 2 pencil, I was churning out pages and pages. It was easy to me, it was endless- a stark difference to my dad teaching me to read through Spongebob beginner books, his frustration as boiling as the car. “Why don’t you get it? It’s not that hard. Now, b-u-t.”

But in the classroom I was the star of the students, in friendly competition during writing assignments, me and another girl neck in neck, putting our eleventh, twelfth, and then sixteenth pages spiked down onto the pile in turns, like a race. She was my friend once when we were innocent. Until she wasn’t, and she saw me for what I was and she put me down beneath her.

She’d sensed it, something innately wrong and undesirable about me- a common theme. I paid too much attention to detail, my dad told me, I dragged in the details on all the things that were unnecessary- so I generalized. A common theme. I made up for all the details he lacked in paying attention to.

I liked writing because I liked to create worlds and stories, I could create anything. I was always doing this. My sister was a physical, scraped knees child but I was inclined to games of pretend, and elaborate plotlines with my dad, my friends, or with myself. I would stare at the patterns of the bathroom tile and create stories and people from what I saw.

I understood, I was intelligent and introspective. I was promising. As I got older into my expired age, I believed in this foreboding feeling. This looming feeling that I didn’t think I had long to live, because I was supposed to shine brightest as a child. How was I supposed to be anything good if not a prodigy? But I was going to be a writer, I had promised my first-grade teacher and everything - my fate was sealed.

Midsummer Interludes: Smashed Crimson Berries on My Face

I like twisting and forming with my words, creating voices and tones and people that I could interpret and develop and delve into the skin of my characters.

I like to understand.

I analyze the people around me, tear and pore over fragments of their souls. I, the poetic windsock to feel the world rushing through me, other people’s emotions and feelings into my own. I seek to find the truth, my truth, and others. Being honest isn’t clean-cut or straight, it’s variable and ever-changing between moments. My mind is unorganized terrain. I think I like control and appearing clean like a gem cut- it’s my last defense. But the gem is cut sloppily, it's a rotting fleshy mess of finishing over the splitting and the separating inside of me.

Writing is unbridling.

Usually, when I write, I don’t know what I’m going to write until I’m writing. It just comes out, it’s just as an exciting mystery to me as you. I mean, I have an idea… usually, but what I write and create typically takes on a life of its own.

I want to understand my emotions and my state of being. To comprehend the complexities of myself and through myself understand others, the behavior of people and why.

I want to feel human.

Goodbye

I want to write to create beauty. I want to watch the world and make incites so profound and beautiful that it fills me. I want to find meaning in my everyday life. I want to find joy in everyday life. I want to want and to keep wanting.

I want to keep climbing and find a field of flowers that I can write about how beautiful they are, and I’ll appreciate life so much more. I’ll put those flowers in a vase I got from an antique store and place it on my round oak table, which will sit directly in the streaming sunlight of the glass panel doors. I’ll sit at that table drinking coffee, writing, drawing, and creating. I’ll look at the colorful arrangement of wildflowers and be reminded of the poetry I created that day as I danced among the long grasses and felt them brush against my skin. I will be filled with a yearning for the living as my head grows dizzy from spinning under the blue sky. The sounds of waves will lap against the shore and I’ll want to be one with the life inside of them. I’ll want children, and friends, and lovers and memories in those waters that will stay with me. I’ll be grateful for the sun that warms my skin and the same sun that will pale against my cat's fur as she stirs just enough to lick her paws. I want a life with a kitchen with green cabinets where the sunlight will glide through the window and over the sink, and through my potted fern plant. There will be a pink suncatcher in the window that the evening sun will hit just right. The setting sun against the wood panels will make my heart sing. I’ll feel joyous to be alive. I want a burning desire that makes me want to clean those counters and a burning desire to feel content with the space I’m in. It’ll be a home because the home will be inside me, I’ll fill it with baked bread and sweets I found in old cookbooks, and it will smell delightful. I will live with my mind’s eye in an eternal summer, and my heart full of a perpetual spring to keep going with fertile growth and hope as laden as blackberry bushes in July. I want to be excited enough to create beauty.

I fear the day when I hate writing. When it becomes as dull as everything else. Sometimes this mission of mine fades and threatens an unthreading deterioration, but the day it renders completely pointless is a day I don’t want to see.

I write to cope with the stiffness inside of me. I write for a hope that I’ll feel whole again. I write for a girl who will allow herself to feel.

I’ve always been soft, I want to be so bare that I can feel the world scrape against my heart. I want to love.

And I want the pain.

And the sadness.

And then the rain that washes it all away. I just want to feel it.

I won’t be afraid because it will all be worth it, because I will have lived. I fear the numbness and the dullness

I want to keep wanting to find a point. A soulless life is not a life worth living.

A soulless life where I hurt others and take from the living. I don’t want to become hard.

I want to make a world so beautiful that I will feel beautiful, and maybe I won’t want to die. But I’m losing light, I don’t know if I have a light anymore-the light that made me so special. My work sounds ridiculous and my thoughts are muddled. I have to keep feeding myself to live. I have to keep getting up. I have to keep interacting with people in this body that is not mine.

And I’ll have to keep trying to grasp onto any enjoyment I feel in my classes before it fades. Find the joy in change. I chase and hunt down and pump life out of any will and desire I have to improve and keep discovering. My writing is mediocre, maybe I am too. I don’t live up to my potential, I crush it, destroy it, and waste it away- if I ever had it all to begin with. I was rotting. I am rotting.

I have to keep living. I have to keep going. I don’t deserve to feel this way. In the end, I write to lie-to lie to myself that maybe there will be a future I can fabricate for myself that will be worth living.