An Unwritten Story

Nothing. Absolutely nothing comes to mind. Personal writing. It’s about me. Who else could possibly know more about me; how I feel, how I cope, how I react, how I think; than me? It’s all there somewhere. Somewhere, all of my thoughts and feelings about anything and everything that has ever happened to me are there but, for now, they seem to reside in secrecy somewhere in my mind.

I’d always thought that when necessary I was quite the essayist and that I was not only able to perform the simple task of recalling an experience, but to be able to relive it on paper, express how I reacted, how I coped, how I felt, after all it is supposed to be about me. I have the memories all here but it seems physically impossible to write about my perspective of events as if I have a stammer of my personal recollection because I know exactly what I want to say but the first words get out...then the rest are trapped. The mental capability to remember but the physical inability to express is an inexplicable frustration. There is clearly a barrier somewhere that is causing this glitch and, for the moment, it remains firmly down.

Four lessons. Four lessons dedicated to getting a first draft of an essay completed and in each of these lessons, I achieved the same thing. Nothing. Well...that is unless two failed attempts of a creative writing piece counts as something. The first one, Blast From The Past, was about a man who is suddenly reminded about the time he lost his wife in an IRA terrorist attack, thus the ambiguous title Blast From The Past which, on hearing it again, sounded cringeworthy; a rather bizarre attempt at humour considering the serious storyline. But the story itself had an obvious lack of empathy which is something y...

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...ame school as me, lived in the same district as me and were just celebrating Christmas like me. The only difference is that they went to the coast to celebrate, and it was that tiny difference that means I am alive and well at fifteen years old and they have been buried for the past nine years. I had a connection to this, it was something that could possibly have led to a great personal story, after all, I experienced this and I have learned from it but it exists to me only in my memory.

I have many others, from some of my earliest memories of being absolutely terrified during a large fireworks display in Singapore for Chinese New Year, so much so that I wrapped myself in large floor to ceiling, wall to wall curtains and cried, right through to very recent memories. But no matter how recent, how significant, how much I remember - I simply cannot write about me.