It took me twenty-one years and two attempts, but by God, I've finished wading through Look Homeward Angel - and I loved it. I know these people - they're my people. All the melodrama, the repressed feelings, the hateful cutting comments, the sense of loneliness and loss - I understood every word, every sensation. I recognize the ugliness and the beauty, and I value both equally. It makes me want to start writing again.
Here I stand again, speaking to an empty room. My thoughts aren't worth the cyberspace they would take up if I cared to tweet or post to Facebook, but here I stand anyway. I had no idea how long it had been since my muse had forced me to write. I used to write almost daily, poetry mostly, when I was younger and believed that someone cared what I had to say. I wanted to be e.e. cummings or T.S. Eliot or anyone who seemed to be so comfortable in his own skin to pour out his emotions onto a blank page. It took me a few years to realize that the writers who filled my pantheon of literary deities were not that comfortable after all, but wrote because not writing was more painful than the spilling of emotion. So I think I will take up my keyboard once more, wade out into the battle, and write.
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