Category: Rant

Writing once a month on this blog is a very bad idea. Not practicing a language is an extremely bad idea, especially when it’s the language that feeds me. Although I read in English all the time, never ever writing in the language makes me prone to forgetting my vocabulary or even how to structure sentences. I know this sounds as I were a beginner, but I’m detecting that something’s very wrong with the English compartment in my brain. The other day I told somebody I was working for, an Arabic-English bilingual, that I felt I had gaps in both Spanish and English. He told me that at last somebody described the way he felt.

Spanish is okay right now because I write fairly often on my other blog. By the way, I feel so much better now that I took the conscious decision to stop forcing stories upon myself. Maybe it’s a bad decision, but I do feel better now acknowledging the fact that I don’t have stories to tell other than my own. Comics, on the other hand… I need to get over my fear of drawing. Rather than that, I need to get over my fear of beginning.

So, where was I? Oh, right. I was so much more fluent when I wrote in English than now that I’m mostly a passive consumer of words. Yeah, I know, it doesn’t make sense if my job is to speak the language. But still, writing fixes words in my mind in a way that mere talking doesn’t. Or maybe it’s like the autowash cycle in the machine that we’re checking out at work—the machine never stops working but everything becomes so much clearer after the washing’s done.

This is the bomblike feeling of having cared for someone who did not care for me at all. This is me having trusted someone who did not believe me when I told them a friend of theirs had wronged me. This is the sudden certainty that time would never change that unrequited trust in spite of recurring conversation. In spite of supposed recurring remembrance. I thought I had the past on my side with all these memories as credentials, but recurrence does not turn the old into new. I didn’t know it —or I didn’t want to know it—, but I was just a faint apparition, a harmless ghost climbing the same flight of stairs night after night.

Rage must be understood in order to be conquered. I need to understand my rage in order to conquer it. No one else can. Or who knows. My father might. He seems to understand it, he seems to recognize an old foolish self of his reflected on me and lets it come and go.

Rage gives me this enormous strength that I don’t want to use, but which I end up doing because it climbs up to my head like boiling milk overflowing. And it’s useless, I know. It’s this useless urge to scream and grab lapels and push away. To bring order out of chaos, with chaos. To bring reason through a completely unreasonable action. To run away and find out later that I’ve scraped my hands and arms in flight. Oh, adrenaline, you remorseless anaesthesia. A narrow escape from my own earthquake.

Who am I when I explode like that? What is the techtonic movement that summons the volcano within? Is there anything that could prevent this from happening again? There must be something bothering me deep inside, but I can’t seem to grasp it just yet. Now I’m just tired and disbelieving of my own self. What the hell is stuck inside here? What is it that I need to vent?

I stopped writing poetry. I don’t know why. All these words used to flow into my head, all these images that sounded so well. But not anymore. Perhaps it’s lack of practice. It’s not as if it were something mystical bestowed upon me by some divine entity which has now forsaken me. No, it’s not at all like that. You have to write if you want to write. And it was a good practice, poetry. It was beautiful. I should take it up again. Of course today is neither August 31st nor September the 2nd, but I’m travelling to the past to stop myself from being so stupid. Here’s Olavia from the future telling you, you have time! Use it. Do all the things you want to do. Don’t wait. Write. Draw. Sing. Read. Do. Do. Do.