I want to keep writing
2003-10-20 || 6:30 p.m.

Words. It's always been words that made me, ever since I first realised that words existed.

When that was I cannot tell but words weaved their way into my head and made me into this person. Words are my substance, they are everything about me, without them there would be nothing of me left, no way for me to communicate. I am only this fake person made of other people's words.

Since I first sat in bed with the night light glowing, burning the strange coal smelling tea lights to ease my croup, reading of how Rapunzel let down her hair and vowing one day to have hair that long.

When I crouched in the dark, hidden by the arm of the sofa with a candle by my side, away with the wild swans, knowing how she felt searching for her brothers, never giving up on finding someone I somehow just knew was out there.

When the words of gipsy stories enchanted me and drew me to their camp fire. I dreamed of long dark hair, gold earrings, travelling forever, of standing out, of being different, of living a life that was mine.

When I found myself in Charlotte. So normal, so unusual, caught with the knowledge that time is fluid, that everything and everyone is all around us. When Elizabeth asked her 'why are you so strange, why do you say such odd peculiar things?' I was never going to be the same again.

And I heard the sound of a train at night. All the places it passed. All those lives I would never know. And I felt that loneliness.

And I understood that the universe was immense and yet could be contained in the smallest particle. I heard words that made me want to cry, to dance. Words that told me about love and desire and the most beautiful things in the world.

I cried when the people conjured out of words died. When Matthew died, when Judy died, when I understood that Clare had died forty years before.

And then I found the words of other storytellers. People whose words crept out of the land. Words that could transport you to a time only just out of reach, tantalisingly near enough to touch.

And poets who spoke of time and eternity, strange shifting shapes and ideas.

I am wholly constructed of words. Nothing else. I am only other people's pen to paper.