A terminal affliction that plagues me is my multiple aggravating half-attempts at chronicling any part of my life. I say half-attempts with how words play hopscotch with me, one step or two but never a complete game. It happens so often that none of the pages of my notebook end with a period. A recurring process—a purging of jumbled words, the frustration melting behind my teeth, the unclenching of my jaw, and then, reluctantly, letting it fall into darkness.

Is it because I can’t seem to understand my own psyche, even at the precipice of moments where I feel that I do? Arm on table, pen on paper, in an act of self-assurance that yes, it will come, it will come, it does not. No spillage of words, no decent metaphors, no images worth painting. Only a flittering of a page and dry ink. They come in abstraction, too malleable to name, slipping through my fingers like dark sand.

Or does it concern a lack in me, a deficiency in ability and craft? It almost feels cruel to feel this much and this deeply and still not having the tools to transpose it properly into some external force. But one thing’s for certain—it’s always been writing, language, and their systems, whose syntax and methodology can be satisfyingly precise, that I reach for time and again. This worsens my stasis, that my devotion to the written word as a reader and its friend has never been rewarded with the ability to write myself. I am tongue-tied.

I want to be a writer. It is a declaration as much as a dream. More than that, I want authorship over my own life, that I want to be the writer of my coming of age. Maybe it’s in the hope that the writing it would allow the start of my dismantling of my arrested development, to record as release, to expunge this older version of me and arrive at a new one.

Maybe that is it—writing is tied to my growth. Am I not already ripe to know my own dispositions?

I liken this phenomenon to the familiar and unrelenting rush when faced with a crush, my mouth meandering on with my eyes downcast. Get on with it, spit it out. Say something. Perhaps that is the commonality—a yearning for clarity, and an exercise of courage. It explains why poets wield words for moments of love. It is a weapon.

C’mon, start somewhere! Speak from somewhere!

And so, fervently and with anguish, I turn a page and continue, its blankness stark, begging me to at least cross a t or dot an i, consider the unfinished as not a failure but an endurance of feeling and time. That it is unfinished for a reason, until there is no reason anymore.

With stilted words, I continue my attempt.