A Return to Form

It is often an idea that spurs my desire to write. An idea so unprocessed, it linguistically dissolves upon writing a word about it. The moment I start to write is the moment where the desire fizzles out, and the idea becomes unknown even to me. It is as if my thoughts chose to be swallowed by obscurity. Auto-forgetfulness, self-abnegation, and self-erasure are some of the things which I can describe this phenomenon. In the middle of writing my thoughts, I begin to forget.

The irony of writing to record a thought, but being unable to since the act of writing causes me to forget is lost on me. I have been experiencing this chokehold for the past five years and I have never seemed to get around it. Looking back, I remember making a pact with my former self that I shall not write anything in a manner that is creative, which includes poems, fiction, or even lyrical essays. Perhaps I hated too much of the things I wrote despite the support I got from some of my peers when I used to be a part of a young literary circle.

But even with that self-imposed restriction, I actually did write creatively but I knew those works would not amount to anything. I still deem this to be true since I may have written some pieces of creative literature in recent times, but I do not think they would ever see the light of day. Those works only exist in passing. They do not represent or express anything that I want to say because, to me, they are just words in space. Their meaninglessness confounds me and even so, I was disappointed that I write the way I do — everything is empty.

When I start to write, I also begin to forget. I chase the idea backward, attempting to cling to any linguistic echo in any form: a fragment of thought, a lonely phrase, a solitary emotion, or an incomplete fiction. Starting from here always puts me in a position to write in the middle of a brain fog. As if every step is a shot in the dark. I am always a blind explorer in the process. My goal was to wade in the darkness, feel the ground, and make a wild guess if it is stable enough to stand on and take that direction for my next step. This is the process that gives birth to the poems I wrote. The method of how words arrive on the page meant nothing when read as a whole. Yet, I gambled everything on the reader’s participation who interprets the poem. The emperor has no clothes.

In that emptiness, what stays is a remnant of an idea. The blurring phantom of an object in motion. It is that kind of idea that stays under your skin—felt and unseen, such as a ghost that has been living inside a house before you move in. It is an idea that refuses to demystify, identify, and make itself known. My perfect other. The holy sacredness of unknowing. The patron saint of all things I repressed.

To all the things I lost and all the people I used to know, they have become a part of this ghost. Sometimes it takes the form of a former self I outgrew, who is perfectly the same and frozen in time. He who has become predictable and so unknowingly full of flaws but is high on life. To whom the world is his oyster, unaware of the consequences of his actions, you are too far to be reached.

Demystifying ghosts requires a certain misunderstanding of time, about how we leave a space dedicated specifically for a single moment. Yesterday’s rain had become an infinite loop where and when it occurred. Graduation ceremonies, stolen glances, funerals, and other events are frozen in time the moment we leave them. They perpetually occur from the moment we enter and leave that point in time. A memory forms, ensuring a playback of various iterations — a gallery of lost time.

Ghosts are the unreliable narrators of our story. To whom we speak in times of solitude. To whom we send the letters we wrote for no one. Ghosts occupy the safe spaces we built for our guilt, anger, and sins. They carry unspeakable truths, the things we fear that could break us if we remember, which is why we forget. We encounter ghosts in familiar places, bringing in a familiar sense of self we lost along the way and chose to forget. Places we abandon because of immense trauma, our brain protects us from even recalling the events that transpired and turns them into fiction.

Dead men tell no tales but what ghosts evoke are echoes of our former selves. If they bring fear to us, it only asks for resolution from within. If they bring comfort, then we have arrived at the point of our own regression. Both outcomes are not positive. The former pushes us to paranoia and delusion while the latter contains us within a false sense of security. Ghosts possess the living when the living surrenders to defeat. A comforting ghost is a prelude to one’s eventual (symbolic) suicide.

It seems that I seek all points of disappearance. This attempt to unmask my own ghosts brought me to realize that I am understanding the nature of ghosts under the guise of envy. If only I can obfuscate my own presence to the extent of absent presence. This desire for nonrecognition, to commit everything to memory — even the present — reflects a kind of surrender to the Other. To let it take the place of my waking life because I am tired. This consciousness is starting to become a linguistic burden that only yearns to express and make itself known to the world. I am tired of explaining myself and I just want to fully resign from all aspects of communication and claim a voice meant for no one.

At this point, the previous declaration of my desire to disappear should be known only as a visit from a comforting ghost. In a form of an intrusive thought, it appears under the guise of a “desire.” I want things that I lack but I always forget that desire is a void. In wanting, I denounce myself by affirming the idea that I am not complete without the object of my desire. Desire is a death drive. The comforting ghost is my companion — the angel that stands on my shoulder.

I am waiting for the devil to reappear. It has been a while since we saw each other eye to eye. Fear has now become a memory I have a faint recollection of. Perhaps, that devil on my shoulder — the ghost that summons all my fears has disappeared because I have learned how to love. What is left now is the topography of my own consciousness where every nonchalant ghost resides. In the following years, I will be trying to rescue every shell of my former self from repression. I may have hidden from the world for a time longer than I intended.