When I was a kid, I was eating books on bread. I lived with my grandmother, an old and rough woman, and I had no friends. In the third grade, our teacher asked us to write a story about our best friend. I wasn’t sure what “best friend” meant, so I wrote about Oliver Twist. The teacher told me it was the best story she ever read and that someday I would become a great writer. I cried for three nights. I promised myself not to write like that ever again. What I wanted was a real friend.
I grew up. My passion for words gradually came to light again, no matter how hard I tried to hide it. Analyzing, reading and rereading other people’s words, I started repeating them to myself, as with humming a tune endlessly, and, as when I was younger, their words didn’t belong to them anymore but to me, and I started re-inventing their meanings and the stories they told. From old words, new stories came to me.
I can’t run away anymore. I have to write to make real the stories from my own mind. I have to write to widen my world and to share it with others, to experience feelings and events that I couldn’t otherwise have. I need to write to catch all my wandering thoughts and to give a purpose to their travels. I have to write because I don’t have a choice, because there’s a continuous struggle between my mind and my hands handling the pen or the laptop and I won’t get any peace until my hands finally obey my mind.
