the stories that made me
On some days
I wear my goose bumps
like armor
and step out into the world
carrying my fragility
like a weapon.
I step out
into a war I didn’t start.
A war I can’t end.
It’s easy to break me.
But when I break I shatter
into poetry;
into sharp
shards
of hand-painted glass.
When
I
break
I will slice the hand that broke me.
When I break,
(because I do break)
I can’t be put back together.
Well, maybe I could,
but I won’t look like I did before.
Maybe I’ll look better.
I took this photo in Vienna late in the summer of 2010. I took it upside down on purpose, because the sky looked like a river. No need to turn your heads or anything. Just look at it the way it is, and imagine that you are on a rooftop looking down onto a river of clouds. Wait for a fish to jump out of the ‘water’.
As I was saying earlier, Sherlock Holmes really influenced the way I conducted my childhood.
The first thing I did was to attempt to apply his logic on my mundane daily happenings. I tried to ‘deduce’ which side my father had shaved with his left hand (based on where he shaved worst); where the light was with respect to my mom as she baked the cake (based on how the icing was crooked); or try to guess which mud came from which garden; and, because there were no murder mysteries to be found in my neighborhood, who stole my coins.
All my deductions were wrong, obviously. My faculty of logic sucked. I could never be a detective and solve mysteries, surely.
But what did happen was even better. My insistence on ‘deduction’ meant I had to keep my eyes open all the time. And by looking at people’s hands, feet, noses, eyes, and mouths, I learned to guess small useless facts about them.
The question I get asked the most on Twitter (and Formspring) is: Are those your own tweets? Hence, I had to change my profile bio to its current state, emphasizing that I’m not possessed by the devil and whatnot.
And what a wonderful topic to explore on my first post. But this isn’t about the profile, or the question. It’s about the tweets themselves, a dissection of the brainwork behind them. I don’t think it’s fair to summarize the process into one or two (or even thousands of) steps. But I do want to tell a story. Why not?
By the time I was in Grade 6, around 11 years old, I had read quite an impressive number of books. That number is 0. Ok, maybe impressive in a negative way. And not counting schoolbooks, of course. I had not read a book outside of the curriculum, and, if my life had gone on the way I wanted, I would have probably continued to not read a book. Why read when I’ve got the TV to keep me entertained.
But in Grade 6, I ran into that inevitable moment when someone’s life takes a turn for its fate.
This is the hardest post of all.
The post that defines, draws the lines, sets the boundaries, and imposes all kinds of limitations. This is the post that I won’t write. There are no boundaries here.
This blog was born not only because several ‘tweeps’ – both real and virtual friends – have urged me to do it, but also because Twitter does have its limitations. No, not the 140-character limit. That one is in fact a delight to work with. The real limitation is attention span. Nobody wants a long idea up there.
So here’s to WalkWays, a blog dedicated to tweeting longer.
Thanks for visiting, and pass by often. Bookmark the blog if you have to. And don’t forget to read the about page for an idea of what’s going on, and the this page about the ‘author’.
Come back tomorrow for the first ‘real’ post :)
PS: Why May 16? It’s my birthday. WalkWays is a gift-to-self of sorts.