From Everything (and then nothing)

It was how we used to write.

In pairs. In sets of three. Fours and Fives and Sixes, all in a row. We wrote in competition of one another, stacking characters atop of characters and seeing who fell first and who they took with them. How high could we get. How far could we fall. There was a certain sense of excitement in putting together the minutiae, going through the frail emotions of stories and characters that we shared and setting it just at the very edge, waiting to see what would happen next. We let things fall out of our hands. We let one another decide our fate.

It was how we used to write. Together. Never separate. Sometimes alone, but always for one another.

And for me, it was that way for ten years. On again and off again, a complicated series of storylines and tangles, similar characters with new names and more ambitious plots and themes each time. Spin-offs of spin-offs of my own original content. I logged my words and practiced my creation in a way that I don’t see many people talking about, don’t see much consideration of. A separate entity from text based role playing, instead it’s cousin. The highly intelligent, overly dramatic, thought provoking world of joint writing. Collaborative fictioning.

Two people, two characters, two styles, one story.

It’s not a story of looking back on it and missing it too much. It’s not a story of looking back on it with a feeling of disdain. I do sometimes miss the wonderment of it all. The fizzling joy under my skin when waiting to work through some part of the story with someone else. Watching it come together in a series of words I came up with at the moment, running them from my brain to my fingertips, through the keyboard and over the other side of the night where someone else was feeling the exact same way I was. Waiting on edge. Picking up what would happen next. Fifteen hundred files and all the ones lost along the way from the last six years alone. Of course, there’s something to be missed about all that. There are things I don’t miss as well, but the story here isn’t about that at all.

The story here is working past that.

I’ve spent the better part of a year wrapping up the trail ends of my old life and tucking them away. Picking up good bits here and there, excavating them, pushing through them and eventually placing them back exactly where they were. Behind me. Under me. Away from me. They’re delegated to their folders with numbers and names, dates written on them and they all sit together, no longer in my line of sight. No longer taunting me and teasing me, making me miss what I once had.

Now it’s about taking what was good from there, finding it, making it mine again.

Building people from nothing but scraps and someone else’s photographs used to be so easy. A small movement of hands, breath or word phrase put together in strange ways. Characters used to come so easy when I knew someone else had an emotional investment in them the way I did. But now things are still so tough. Still so lackluster. I stall out on the easiest things. Names, faces, hair color, interests. They squeak and slow, they move together in circles and go nowhere.

What happened to Kase, the redheaded boy with the broken hand and broken nerves? What happened to Parker, the cyborg with the comically cybernetic brain and obsession with Mexican culture? What happened to Tobias with his red glasses and electrical affliction. How was it so simple before? How do I not own what was once mine?

I know I’m not burnt out, but still, sometimes…

I fill up on inspiration. Full of comic books and art books. A table full of atlases and a wall of tall tall buildings to bring straight into my own dark cities. Cautious glances at other people’s creations. An attempt to remember that small feeling. An attempt to bring it back to my forefront. Back against my lungs, tightening, keeping me wide-eyed open and excited. This is why instead of running away from the process and the people, I’m running back towards it. Reclaiming what was mine. My city. My characters. My neon electric night. The world I forgot I lived in. Taking it back and walking away with it again. Working past it. Making it mine all over again. Mine all alone. Characters and stories and places that answer only to me.

For the past year I traveled with data-gypsies with their family problems. Half of them spoke so loud and half of them didn’t speak at all. I learned so much about plot and structure. I learned how to sit down and write write write. I learned how to get it done. It was so good and yet felt so dry at the end of it all.

For now though? For now, I’m just trying to remember how to love. What I loved. There is a way and I will find it. It’ll be my own, tiny little hero’s journey.

And finally laying out where I came from is the biggest breath of all. It’s the only place I can start.