What Comes Naturally

There’s a window in the apartment I’m currently live in. It’s a rather large window, and I’m able to lean out of it and breathe fresh morning air as I write this. The air… feels familiar. It rained last night, and the air has a bit of water around it. It’s soft and sweet, and if I close my eyes and just breathe it in, I feel a deep calm inside me. I don’t think of my growing impatience at my job, of the aches in my heart, of the things that aren’t as I wish they were.
The air smells of the beach. I can close my eyes and remember leaning out my balcony in Santa Marta last year, hearing the ocean crashing just a 1 minute walk away, smelling fresh sea salt in the air. I keep breathing and open my eyes. The soft light reminds me of afternoons I spent rushing on my bike to the public library after school, to find a book all of my own; of days I spent all daylight leaning against a log, reading everything I could in an attempt to fix a broken heart. The soft breeze reminds me of nights spent by myself on the roof of my old house, all alone with the whole of creation.

I feel myself relax, and let go of the worries that have been weighing me lower and lower in the last few days. I wish I could stay here forever.

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I had a random sadness attack yesterday. It’s what I’ve decided to call the sudden urge to cry that occasionally strikes me now and then. I spent all day alternating between crying, trying not to cry, and wanting to cry but being unable to do so. All day I attempted to write a song, a poem, a story to express how I felt, but it was all garbage. I won’t even try to defend any of it. It was terrible and maudlin, and didn’t give my sense of loss the respect it deserves.

That impatience with myself reminds me of a fantastic zenpencils post on just that subject.

You should read the strip and look at all his other work; zenpencils is very, very good

 

The frustration that comes from trying to create something worthy of being created, but being unable to make it so is maddening. I will sometimes feel a song forming in my head, but when I try to play it on my uke or guitar, to write down lyrics for it, I can only form a short chord progression, a couple of half-decent lines that don’t feel anything like they should.

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A lot of things have come naturally for me. I have an instinctive sense for maths that helped me relax my way to 10th grade, when I decided not to study Pre-Calc because I’d rather have more free time. I can read a 1000-page book in a day, provided I have nothing else to do. In three days, if I spend 8 hours at work each day. I never struggled writing essays at school, and for the trouble I caused myself through procrastination.

I learned how to play the guitar by myself, and from there I’ve been able to pick up the uke, quattro, mandolin in a handful of days, or hours.

I’m not going to go on. The point is, I’ve been blessed with many talents. Not with everything, though. I can’t illustrate people worth a damn, I can’t sing. I can’t write poetry, or songs, and I can’t paint.

I wish I had a way of expressing myself artistically. Instead of writing how standing by my window feels, to just show you. To make you feel it.

I can’t do that.

It frustrates me beyond belief that I can’t just practice those things for a couple of days and suddenly be good at them. I’m aware I could potentially be a good poet or songwriter of I put the time and the effort in, but I’m not used to that. I’m not used to working hard to achieve skill in something.

This is probably the least relatable of everything I’ve written on this blog, but it’s what’s on my mind. I’m dedicating myself to improving my writing, it’s why I started this blog, and I’m starting to lose encouragement because it was harder than I thought. Nothing to do but suck it up, I suppose.

Onwards and upwards.

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