How do you talk about things everyone else has already said? I swipe dust from the shelves of memoir and biography in the back corner of the bookstore, careful not to disturb the covers of the regal books that face out, looking at the world with their peculiar lens, a promise that when I pick it up it will say something to me. I trace a few of the raised bumps of the titles and authors.
What is writing for, anyway? I have too many answers and none at all, and maybe here is the real reason my silences linger, the cursor fails to move closer to a completed sentence, a full thought. Belief in oneself is a strange and impossible thing: I know that I am, that I exist, that belief is impossible to resist isn’t it?
But I find myself also faltering in the belief of the things others say they see when I appear in the doorway: a writer, a philosopher. Am I these things if the words don’t come? Are these things temporal things, what I once was, but am no longer? And what if they do not return, what then? If there is never another idea in the midst of me that sings out for being written down, or the metaphors leave like flocks of birds launched skyward for migration?
I am in a forest of belief and unbelief. They alternate like trees along a path that is almost but not quite invisible. You can feel the path, your feet believe that you are not merely walking along in the complete wilderness. But if you look down you cannot believe this because the grass climbs up past your knees and the flies buzz, disturbed from their perches, and overhead is tree after tree, glistening with light as you sweat and wonder if it is better to keep going or to stay, or to return and hope that the way you came before is still there for you.
My feet keep going in this forest, my fingers type, I am too afraid to look at the words for fear I’ll lose my place and fail in my belief that writing is still a thing that I do or a way that I exist. I think I trust my feet, my fingers, I think I believe, I think this is the path through the forest where the trees crowd thick and the sun only so often glimmers. I think this is the path, and the grass is high and the butterflies float past, the flies buzz in indignation, there are birds overhead, the air is thick and sweet with moss and dirt and the humidity of summer.
There is a path through belief and unbelief. There is a way of being in the forest.