Just Writing

"I’m writing because to do otherwise is to think. We rang the hospital. My father has just come back from surgery. I want to say no more. Not for reasons of discretion but just because I don’t think it’s right to do that. I try not to think about, let alone verbalise, certain things. I can only exist from minute to minute, as I have been doing for the last few days. My thoughts are elsewhere. I wait for another hour. Another phone call.

Writing this is an escape and I wouldn't write it if I wasn't going to post it. It has been a long morning in the longest three days of my life. Since Monday evening, I have done so much sitting, waiting, thinking, and changing, in however small a degree, as a person.

My attitude towards bloggers has also changed. The very act of blogging, it strikes me now, has always been a positive thing. I have always made much about writing comedy as a means of making a moral statement about how we should live. I’ve always been inspired by Lord Byron whose early life was couched in writing bleak, melancholic poems such as ‘Childe Harold’, but in later years, chose to write ‘Don Juan’, one of the finest comic poems ever composed. He clearly made a choice. I never thought of bloggers doing the same. I never before realised how much we are a community. That we choose to contribute, for whatever reasons of whatever ways, we are contributing to something that is wholly good.

We have rebels. We have conservatives. I have always seen myself as a rebel. I would always do things that ran counter to the prevailing current. Even in the last few weeks, I have annoyed people when I only wished to amuse them. It’s to be expected. People who appreciate my humour, the things I want to say, would find me eventually. Some might enjoy or see the point in what I try to do.

That a few have understood me has always been of great pride. For me, the real world is not much of a world (at least, not in the North West) and living in my words and through my words, I tend not to want too much an outer world. I don’t drink. I don’t smoke. I don’t go clubbing. I just write and be with a family. They sustain me. It’s only friends that I meet online, that I come to know and choose by reading their blogs, that have become some of the closest friends I have. I quote them daily as though I have only just met them that morning. It’s hard to convey but as an anonymous commenter puts it: ‘A blogger becomes a secret family member and best friend and they are a special breed.’ However, I never really truly understood this until I witnessed the depth of the support I’ve received in the last few days. There haven’t been hundred of emails but there have been a few, all of which have been very meaningful to me. Some make me cry. Some make my heart swell when it has only been feeling small and insignificant. The messages have sustained me but not in large obvious ways. I feel like somebody has reached out and shared a moment’s warmth with me. In this there’s everything that we forget about being human. Being civilised. Being together.

I questioned when I wrote my previous post, feeling like hell, lying in bed at six AM yesterday, after three hours of weak, broken sleep, that I was reducing my father’s suffering to ‘a blog event’. I disabled comments because I didn’t want to make it feel like some fiction. I am glad that I did that but I am even happier that you still reached out to me. I still wait. I still worry. I still feel so much hurt. But I am also proud to have discovered so many real and decent people."