I am but a conduit

When I finish a piece, the satisfaction lasts only a moment. Almost instantly something shifts, like a stone dropping into still water. What follows is a dread I carry for days: that whatever opened in me has closed and I will never be able to write another sentence.

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I picture writing as a glass wand, thin-walled and iridescent, balanced in an unsteady hand. One wrong movement and it shatters.

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Like a self-fulfilling prophecy, the fear of not writing causes the inability to write, which feels incredibly lonely. I am cut off from my source of inspiration. A door shuts. I walk toward it, knock, hear nothing.

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Continuing to sit at my writing desk does not help but most of the time I cannot bring myself to get up. It feels too much like surrender, something I’m not good at. After a couple of days, having convinced myself that I really tried, I get up during writing hours and go out into the streets of Barcelona. At some point, when I see how the light filters through the trees of my favorite street or when a Pakistani rider with a free Imran Khan sticker on his yellow Glovo basket smiles at me, the door springs open by itself. The words pour out as if they had been waiting, impatient, on the other side. I capture those words in the journal I always carry with me and rush home to put them on the computer.

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I am but a conduit. During the best moments of writing, I’m not aware of writing. There is only writing. The sentences arrive from somewhere I cannot name or locate; I am simply the passage through which they move. It is the most alive I ever feel. But it’s entirely outside my control.

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That is where the suffering comes from. To depend on something that does not answer to me, that might choose another passage at any time — this is a specific kind of vulnerability.

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I ask myself why writing is so important to me that I freeze up at the thought that I might not be able to do it anymore. I think the answer is that if I cannot write about what drives me, if I cannot explore my thoughts, my encounters, my experiences and if I cannot share all of that, my life has no meaning. Of course that’s nonsense, the meaning of life is life itself, but still I feel as though I must earn life by writing about it. Writing about my life validates it.

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So tomorrow morning I’ll sit down and wait to see if the door will open again.