You have to remember that not all silences are scary.
That they don’t always mean the end
of a story,
of a show,
of a conversation.
Sometimes, they’re just a pause.
An intermission.
A time for you to gather your wits, your strength,
to get your heart ready for the next part.
Maybe sometimes they mean more than a little pause.
Maybe it’s a time to get your heart and mind focused again.
Or maybe it’s just a time to sit still.
You need to stop being afraid of these silences.
You need to realize
how some of the best things can come out of these silences.
That this silence can be beautiful,
if you let it.
You need to fight
against these voices in your head
that urge you to make noise.
Sit and revel in this silence.
And believe that this is good.
You have to remember that not all silences are scary.
I joined this romance novel(la) writing class at the start of the year. I didn’t want to, because I’ve always been insecure about my writing and joining an actual class scares me, but I joined anyway because:
Fast forward to a couple of months later, I am in the middle of my writing my novel, rushing to meet the class deadline and I realized two things:
The novel is a mess
I don’t like middles
It’s understandable that my novel is a mess right now because it’s a rough draft, and all my novels that went through this phase is such a spectacular mess that most of them get buried underneath all my files in my hard drive. But one thing I realized as I worked on my outline and wrote the story is that writing the middle is always the hardest part.
.
“But the middle is how you get to the end!” A writer friend told me when I lamented on this fact over Twitter. I know. Don’t get me wrong — I love reading very good middles, but it can get a bit frustrating when I’m the one writing it. It’s easy to start, and I always know how I want my story to end. I can see those two parts clearly. I know some bits of the middle, of course, but I realized that the ones I have now aren’t really enough to get me to the end. Or, they’re just vague ideas of what I want to happen, but they’re not always connected. They’re little scenes that I know would bring them to that end, but they don’t necessarily form a smooth transition from one part to another, making the readers see how these characters get from Point A to Point Z (or their fictional happily ever after). They’re awkward at best, which isn’t really a problem because I can always refine it. But they’re so hard to write sometimes because it’s not as exciting as that ending I have in my head.
I don’t know if anything has changed, but things feel different somehow. It feels warmer. Not summer warm (or hot, rather), but more like the first rays of the sun peeking from the horizon after a long and sleepless and cold night. It was a welcome feeling, and I’m so, so, so afraid that it’s just a fluke, that it’s just one of those strange days that things are different.
But why am I subscribing to such negativity? Why can’t I just sit back, relax, and enjoy everything?
02.
I was angry. No, I was fuming.
I can’t remember the last time I was so pissed off about something, so bad that I wanted to cry. I wanted so much to fight back, to answer, to say something to put some people in their place. I was one click away to doing it, but a friend stopped me and told me to take a walk.
And so I did.
I was still so angry, that I needed to let it out. I called a friend and started ranting, and after I have said everything, after I have spent some time speaking about my anger, being all ranty and whiny, he says, “It’s kind of shallow, you know.”
I was in tears. The frustration just bubbled up, and I wondered if there was something I could have done, if there was something I could’ve said to make everything stop. What if, what if, what if.
And then I wondered: are we really bad people?
It was then I really disliked everything, and even them. I hate that they made me doubt the goodness in the people I know, and most especially, me.
04.
I was snapping, snapping too fast. It was an automatic reaction when I talk to them sometimes, and I am not proud of it.
I think there’s a special kind of grace involved when dealing with your family. It’s easier to be nice with your friends because you don’t live with them, and you are often always together with them in the happy times. But when you live with some people who know you inside out, whose words can automatically set your nerves ringing with annoyance, it’s easier to snap and answer back.
But I’m too old for things like that. I’m too old to be a brat, I’m too old and I should know better.
