I’d forgotten that I write. It’s been ten years since I had my accident. Slowly gathering back memories that I’d been reassured would return. I felt like I had returned back to my life, my job, different girlfriend, my band. I had to relearn how to play keyboard and use and modulate a synthesizer, I relearned how to catch public transport, how to be competent at my job. I attended a music therapy class, I studied myself performing in my successful rock band via video. I opened up my inner self and revealed the most intimate detail. I sought out balance with sexual desire and how hard to push and pull within different gender relationships. I earned enough money to venture overseas and rediscover what it is to obtain international conviction. I got married and discovered the pain of separation. I relived a drug culture hailed by earlier generations. I thought that I was on track becoming me again, striving for an earlier self, a better version, the one I had lost – myself. After triggering and reliving every last aspect of me I thought it was safe to say that I had found it. 2014 marked the tenth anniversary of a sliding moment that changed the course of my life. I was talking to an old lost friend at a barbeque late last year relating my story when I realized. I realized that it wasn’t over after all. That I hadn’t been cured, I wasn’t the same and in actual fact I was stuck in some sort of shrouded Kubler-Ross model of denial. It occurred to me that I had spent the last ten years fixing something that can never be fixed. That in fact this life wasn’t about what was but what is. In that moment I realized that ‘I write’. Words are precious because they name your world, they define your existence and since I know what it is to not exist or die metaphorically I need as much naming as I can get. At the beginning of the year I decided to conduct an experiment, for the month of January I would do nothing but write. There was no better place to start than where I was, I did this in Melbourne. I got up every day from my flat and found places to play with words. I sat in cafes, I found waiting rooms and hotel foyers, I went to Docklands and sat over water. I discovered the non-spaces people ignore. I wrote short stories, poems, observations and prose. I went to places I had never been before. Every day it was all I did and every night it was all I could think about. I discovered a passion and need to write it down and to place myself in it. Writing reminds me who I am, what I’ve been through and where I’m going. It observes now and transports into the future. I would dearly like to learn how.
