I demand too much of writing. I demand every story to tell everything, everything in totality; the beauty and the horror. Unable to bear the weight, it crumbles right at the tip of my fingers, and like dust, vanishes into the thin air, unsettling, drifting through the air for all eternity, awaiting the day I might obtain some sense of order in the way I exist. That is, if I manage to put anything down.
Everything remains unfinished, unsaid, and my head remains full of words crumbling under the weight of each other, all of them hoping to be released, the pressure building and piling with no possible explosion. I picture a stampede and I can save none of the stories, none of the characters and this massacre breaks my heart, makes me feel like Leopold Two to Congo. Of course, he had no guilt or remorse.
To ease the burden on the stories I desire to tell, I truncate, cut short what I want to say, or keep going on and on about the colours of the sky and forget that I am sitting amidst a people who need to tie their shoe laces so they can get on with their life. Zubeida (that place-holder name that must be replaced) needs to find the road to the home she seeks in Northwards in Search of History. Thomas sits before his computer screen in The Stranger, wondering if this is the love that leads him to himself, the lady in The Crematorium needs to finalize on assigning tasks to those who should find her body when she has departed. Why do I never stop writing about departures?
It goes on and on. Men, women, children, wildlife, nature, and forever the child of a pastoralist unable to let go of that part of my life, the livestock. Did I build too big a world that I have lost control? Frankenstein and his monster, roaming the world offering destruction, demanding to be fixed in some way.
Sometimes, I am able to fix it, lead the story home right to its front door, watch it go on, shut the door and turn off its lights, and know that it is safe in this aboard that I have amateurly architected. Even then, I worry a little, about the dialogue, and the setting. Should I have placed it again, in the heart of Marsabit? But Thomas Hardy wrote about nowhere but Wessex. Although I am no Hardy. Am I capable of curating something otherworldly and I do think a lot about otherworldly and so I set story in Pluto and the story is supposed to come back home to Earth. It doesn’t, stuck in a different planet not-planet that requires me to go down a rabbit hole of quantum mechanics, wormholes,
and black holes and maybe there is a simpler way to extricate a character, maybe I do not need to extricate her, and my ability to complicate the simpler things creates all the barriers that once I have placed, I am unable to jump over. It feels as if I lock myself in the house and throw the key through the window, far into the forest outside and have to figure out how to leave. Except, the burden of this falls on all the society I am creating, or rather, I am incapable of creating.
The ‘experts’ talk of plot lines, single-idea stories, and all these building blocks that are supposed to lead me to clarity of what I want to say. It starts out well but somewhere between the story being born and the character taking shape, I lose all of it to paradoxes and I am back to the realities and the imaginations jumbled up into tangled cables out of which I must produce the plug-in end of it. Can I write in fragments for life?
Will I be accused of living a fragmented life too, because I do, and sometimes, it sounds like poetry and other times, like rubbles from which I must be saved. And the world is fond on emphasizing on how no one is coming to save me, or you, even though there are firefighters and officers of all kinds committed to my security and isn’t that too, a form of saving? A weapon too, formed against the possibilities of peace. You see it too, don’t you? The complexities and paradoxes are not something I create. They are in every little thing.