Last night I got the idea to get up and go straight to the laptop to begin my writing and not do my handwritten pages. I've been sitting down to the pages with a pen in my hand regularly since I moved to Hannibal, MO in 2006 and before that, sporadically since December 1994. I have so much written ... memories from my childhood, trying to piece together my own story, the daily events that befall a life and trying to make sense of all that ... books many times over if I could glean what's in my spiral pages. But they are another world, really, a world that I only get to with my pen and the open page. I need to get to that world through a different portal, one that can be accessed and saved in a format that I can use for other works. I need to be able to type my way in and then save it or take chunks out and use them in Word documents.
Already this seems foreign, another territory all together. I miss my pen! I miss the feel of paper under my hand. I miss watching words slide out and the sight of my own handwriting filling the page. I know that that was a habit I developed over many years and the thought of not doing it or missing more than a day occasionally makes me sad and nervous, like I'm lost in a huge, dark building. This typing accesses a different part of my brain and I have to train the door to that section so that is swings open at my will. Right now it's a little stuck ... I can rattle it but it won't open past an inch or two. But I'll keep at it.
I actually practice writing on Facebook each day and share my thoughts and experiences with others, especially the grieving mothers in The Compassionate Friends groups. I'm a member of two groups, one is the loss to substance abuse group, the other is the loss to suicide group. I was in the former group for many months before finding out about the later and it's the later, the suicide group, that tears at my heart each day. Those poor mothers! Some of those kids were so young, many under 15 years old and one as young as 11! My God, what could cause kids that age to kill themselves?!
The horror of suicide with these mothers and their young kids, mostly boys, is stunning and I cry every day for them. I seldom write a comment, I'm too shocked, my mind can't get a grip on what happened.
I think back to Stephen at that age, 13, 14, 15 ---- we lived in Quincy, IL from August 1995 to June 1998. He was 12 when we moved there and 15 when we left. Those were the hardest years, the beginning of his self-destruction, a process that would take him until age 30 to complete. I want to find a way to tell his story, our story, in an interesting way, a way that doesn't inspire horror or pity, but might lead to understanding and possibly save lives.I watched him get enamored with suicide, with Silvia Plath and her stories and poems. As soon as he found out about the concept of suicide, it seemed like he wanted to try it, as if it were a drug or a food, something that he could recover from! And the idea stayed with him for the rest of his life, as if it were a fall-back plan when things got too hard, he could always just kill himself. No big deal, really. Where did he come up with that, I wonder?
OK, I got a start here, typing. I wonder if I publish this if anyone will see it or if I have to go post a link in order to call attention to it? Seems to me, this blog site has been abandoned long ago and setting up shop here for some journaling would be a safe place, like finding an empty building that no one is using or taking care of and just sort of move in, hoping no one will notice. I turned off the comments section so I'll never know if anyone reads this unless they come find me on Facebook. Until then, I'll assume that I'm private here in this building --- I like the idea that I'm finally using this space for something after all.
