words

From my earliest memory I have been tortured and tormented by longing and desire: Desire to share a few moments with a particular person, the one person of that moment who seemed to be beyond everyone else in their unique qualities. I still recall the smell, the light, the time during primary school when, at approximately ten years of age, I’d feel a great panging of loss as a film would beam onto the huge screen in the hall to celebrate the last day of school before the holidays and for me those holidays only meant a time when I would not see this person. We did not have computers or the internet, phones or social media and there was absolutely no hope of contact, the holidays were simply a long and stretched out period of isolation. The school would close for the summer and I would linger with my friends at the gate hoping for one last glance, or for something miraculous to happen and to share a few words.

I remember a different time, in high school, when I stood beside a bus that contained all of the girls from my year, including the one I loved at the time, and watched with a sense of grief as it prepared to drive them to a remote part of the country for a week of field school. The boys were going to a different place but I refused to go because it was not science, it was a military escapade, and I equated it to a preparation for the army and for war and a life of discipline, convention, dogma and tradition.

            It was the same at college and university and the same again when I began to work… always longing for one person when they left to go on holiday or, at times, even a Friday would sadden me when I realised I would not see someone again until Monday.

I am grateful for it now because it was this very sense of torture that drove me to literature. I needed to write down my feelings and to capture them in order to try to decipher them and find some meaning in them. Books comforted me because I realised that any writer who sat for hours upon hours to write was ultimately trying to do the same thing: to make something beautiful of the pain and confusion that haunted them. Memoirs, journals, letters and autobiographical works of fiction struck a chord within me and I realised at a very early age that this world of words was mine. Words have often been my only company in times of great pain and suffering. The have been by my side when I have been so horribly lost and lonely that I have wanted to give up on life itself. A pen and paper beside a river in Oklahoma, a park in San Diego, an open square in Chicago, a train station in Texas, a bus depot in Missouri, a pub in London, a garden in Johannesburg, a hotel room in Cape Town, a desolate apartment in Madrid, an empty bedroom in Vigo… words were the way to a world of clarity… they were the tools that I used to break through the mist and mud of daily life and to resolve the feelings of love lost and longing unfulfilled.