November is a month of what feels like perpetual stress and an unwavering dependence on the light therapy lamp that sits beside my bed. In my teenage years, the start of winter always called for a steaming cup of ginger tea, a smoke, and alone time with a fresh journal. Writing harbored an intense sense of power over me in these formative years – I like to think my identity was crafted within the countless pages I’ve filled, each entry providing a small contribution to my growing adult consciousness.
I’m not very good at texting. It’s a cheap and tired excuse, one that holds the power to dismantle relationships and prompt debilitating periods of isolation, but it’s true. I told my friend this before I moved away in an effort to prepare her for my infuriating tendency to text at odd hours of the day or reply only in my head. It was a relief when she admitted she was no better.
We decided we would write letters. She sent the first one by mail and, given that she was dispatching it from halfway across the world, her letter may as well have been sent by pigeon post. It was disappointing if anything – by the time it arrived, weeks had passed and all that I was left with was an outdated report of her life. I now keep that first letter pinned up on my wall as both a token of sentiment and a masochistic reminder of the distance between us.
We eventually came to the consensus that email was the only pragmatic form of contact. Our digital letters quickly developed their own rhythm, each message imitating the natural flow of conversation between kindred minds. The dread I had been feeling each time I sat down to journal quickly shaped itself into a restless desire to reconstruct my thoughts into poetry. I wrote anywhere I could – sitting in the back of crowded lecture halls, squished between strangers on the 16, cross-legged on a park bench in the middle of Stephen’s Green. The itch to write was sporadic and at times inconvenient, but I always gave in – inspiration is too fleeting to ignore. I knew that all too well.
Our emails were consistent until they weren’t. At some point, life became too complicated to translate into words and days no longer held time for creative revelations. The guilt of my artistic stagnation sent me into a whirlwind and soon enough, I was drafting my ‘so sorry, will have letter to you soon’ text almost biweekly. I let it slide, convincing myself that I was suffering from writer’s block or that the absurd amount of college work was what kept me from writing, but really it was just me getting in the way of, well, me.
In an attempt to be forthright, it’s important that I admit my relationship with writing has never been a smooth one. On several occasions, I’ve felt a shift in my artistic desires. Whenever I feel burdened by the world, unable to cope with life’s melodramas, my journal starts to feel less like a system of comfort and more like an emblem of bitter nostalgia and devastation. It’s frustrating, this resentment that grows inside of me. But for a period of time, our emails provided an inexpressible sense of solace that I have yet to find elsewhere; we were each other’s journals, for the time being.
I’m in my third year now and we no longer write letters. Our friendship endures, steady as ever, but I can’t help but miss the quiet comfort of knowing my thoughts, confessions, dramas, and ideas were all peacefully resting at the top of her inbox. I suppose writing this was my own twisted way of convincing myself to sit down and draft another letter. But if there’s one thing I’ve learned over my years of inconsistent creativity, it’s that art can’t be forced. Inspiration is fragile – what you do with your inspiration doesn’t have to be.
