Missing

Very suddenly this week, I've been confronted with a number of huge considerations. And considerations of this caliber are not often what I trouble myself with. I realized that I do not worry about the things that other people worry about. The other day, I had a midterm. Rachel Neumeister came to my class so she sat in on my midterm. I didn't study for it at all; I had no time to, and I had bought the textbook ONLY that week. But I just took the test. Afterward, my friend David Bui was sitting in the lobby, his little laptop on his lap and his legs dangling, very much distraught over the entire thing, which had already left my mind. Is this okay? Should I be worried? If I'm five minutes late for a class, I don't try to run to class. I already know I'm late. For some reason, it just doesn't raise my stress level.

I feel like I'm missing something. This is what raises my stress level.

My breath stops, and my chest tightens, tighter, tighter, I can't breathe, and tears race to my eyes and my face turns hot, and I wonder, "What's missing? What's going on? Why can't I find it? Where are you!?"

That has happened twice now. Once in my room, once in my car. I even pulled over to the side of the road, and later, was happy enough to forget it had happened, and forget that something is lost.

And the important ones around me are worrying about my future - where my certainty is the hugest blessing that I possess, and I cling to it forcefully. I don't know what I'd do with myself if I were to lose that one.

I found myself with an opportunity to live somewhere new, and a life-time career direction presented to me within two days of each other. When I asked a very close friend about these, those paled in comparison to a different concern he had: I need to write.

This is what writing is. It is the mountain-mover, the world-shifter. It is literature that is the conduit for conducting an orchestra of changing thoughts, shifting ideas, and holy revolution. It is the sword and it must be wielded. The formula for saving the world was always a written one, and the world operates on stories. All of them conspiring, hoping, and praying for resolution. Please let it be comic, not tragic, for the whole world hinges on the hope of a happy ending. The power a simple story can possess is frightening. Stories can be immortal, and they can infect the mind, and possess a nation. And they are very, very hard to quell, and nearly impossible to silence. Books can be burnt, and words go up in smoke, but a good story worth telling is very hard to forget. Donald Miller wrote his latest entry on the Universal Morality, which I was writing essays about in school last year. All stories are classic, and are conspiring for the right ending, and all of the world's morality is built upon this. Let good triumph and evil be vanquished. Let the lover's remain united. Let there be happily ever after. All of our lives are praying desperately for the conclusion, for the journey, for the new story to come to town and our lives to be overthrown. And we're praying for a right conclusion, a comedy, and never, never, never a tragedy.

What a story is to me, is that I've been writing stories since I could pick up pencils. It's a solace in a lonely world, and an exciting and forceful drive to life. It takes over, and literally possesses me when I write, transforming vague ideas into crystal, vibrant, clear, and deafening. My mind narrates my world, and I imagine different stories, different scenarios, and future scenarios, imaginary stories, everything. I look at books, and stop reading and imagine a better story than the words flooding the pages.

But most importantly, and desperately, for me, is that in a world where too often, in the heat of the moment, my words are lost, I cannot open my mouth, and my tongue is trapped and I cannot speak of word of coherent eloquence to try and reverse the tragedy. When later I regret deeply, and think of a million words to scream and say in a time where it is too late... and if I ever get another chance, my eloquence is still snatched from me. And I cannot talk. I cannot, as hard as I try, allow myself to make coherent sense, to scream why this is WRONG, and to say what must be said. Writing is always clear, always more eloquent than I can ever be, and always says what must be said at the right time, with awesome force. Whatever it is that possesses me to write so... is the best weapon I wield.

I just need a story to write. I just need to be ABLE to write, and write well. I pray it comes soon.