#thuhuong

Raking up past traumas piling them up and burn them like leaves. The smoke will sting your eyes, sharp tears will fill and overflow cleansing out gritty painful emotional distresses accumulated in your life.

Let the leaves fall, let them burn, do not hang on to habitual pain even if it’s your comfort zone. There are patches of blue sky somewhere... you must believe somehow that there are flowers and green grass and soft sunlight.

Smile even if it is a distorted smile, your broken heart will mend.

December 1984 - I was blindly in love with you even after you told me there is a dark side in every one.

Then I left myself and ventured out into unknown space wanting to find the truth about the dark side of the moon. Along the way I tumbled into injuries and scarring and losses. When I reached the other side of earth there was no moon. As insanity approached me I found myself crawling in the depth of a crater. Grey dust and a sense of hopelessness or was it weightlessness?

There I was, then I was... facing the dark side of the moon.

There I lost my way and could never go back.

My love, what had happened to us?

Today I read an article in The New York Times (July 27th 2015): Joe Gould’s Teeth, The long-lost history of the longest book ever written, by Jill Lepore, professor of history at Havard.

‘I wrote all day. Wrote all day. Wrote.’ (Joe Gould)

A friend of mine had just finished a project. For one hundred days, everyday she crocheted an item - an art work; and posted it on her website. It’s like saying a prayer everyday! I thought of N., sitting quietly in her armchair, her long hair streaked with the pink strands of light shining through the lampshade, her children sound asleep, her husband perhaps watching a non-watchable program on TV; and N’s fingers, gently weaving, creating a rainbow-colored scarf. Day 91th. Nine more to go!

‘I write everyday. Write everyday. Write.’ (huong1952)

No, I do not suffer from hypergraphia like Joe Gould! I once thought of writing about a topic:’Must I write?’. This had been in my mind for maybe a year or two now. One can never be exact on anything especially if it concerns time. But it’s more than a year now. Thinking of writing. Sure I must. Write.

The fear of editing is the worst obstacle for me when I write. Many times after chopping, cutting, and patching up a piece of work; I felt totally ‘mutilated’, ‘violated’, ‘spent’ and ‘discouraged’. Retrieval of cut-up thoughts was like trying to salvage a water-colored painting after the artist deliberately splashed a glass of water on it, out of anger or sadness upon seeing its imperfection.

Minimal editing except for ‘immediate recognizable mishaps’ the eyes and mind can see along the way will help overcome this fear of writing. Then I will be able to ‘Write every day. Write.’

Writing as an act of faith, a dressing of wounds, a wailing at the sacred wall, a breathing out of ‘what ails the soul’, a smile much needed, a sob in the lonely darkness...

Writing to live and relive life, to inhale and exhale, to commit (what?) and to atone (for what?)...