This is Mine

I believe in the power of words. 

Sometimes, though, I forget something and tonight I stumbled across a reminder. Occasionally, the writer gets separated from the writing. It takes on a life of its own and as the writer, I feel like a branch caught in the current, just along for the ride. 

But the thing is, I am the writer and that makes the writing mine. 

The world is made of uncertainties. People drift apart from childhood friends. They fall in love and get their hearts broken only to fall in love again. Maybe they find the right person or maybe that person never shows up. Maybe there is no one right person. Hopes rise and are brought crashing down by ruthless reality. Dreams fade under the sheer weight of passing weeks where nothing extraordinary happens. There's a saying my history professor is fond of: All we know for certain is I am here and this is now. Nothing else is known for sure.

My writing is mine. Nothing, death or travel or change or loss, will change that. I wrote it down and so it will live. Even if I got hit by a bus tomorrow and lost all memory of the last ten years, my writing would be there. It would still be mine.

Writers too often get consumed by what other people think of their writing. Their criticisms, their preferences. Sometimes, I find myself furious with what someone said about a line in a poem that I love but they think I should have made a different stylistic choice. I thought it was just my inner bitch coming out. 

It isn't (well, maybe a little bit.) It makes me angry because that person is trying to take my writing and make it theirs. And no one, no one, has that right.

Writing belongs to the writer. It is part of us, no less vital than our blood or our skin. Writing gives us power if we do it well but that does not make it any less ours.

When everything else fades into memory, lost to the haze of age and decades of life, I will still have this. 

This is mine.