A True Calling

A kind woman once told me that one day I'd be an amazing author because I had a true gift for words and expression. She was wrong. I was raised a writer, but I'm not an author.

To my father, I owe my unequivocal love for all things literature, my earliest and most precious childhood memories go back to afternoons and weekends spent at our local library. My father loved paranormal books with a passion that not even the authors of the genre could match. Though I was still a young girl, I was fascinated by encyclopedias, VHS tapes were also at their peak and our library dedicated an entire section to them and to CD's. The latter marked me more than the books themselves, thanks to my curiosity I then discovered my love for film scores.

I admired my father's tenacity to read book, after book, after book, but most of the times it's what you can't see that will change your life. That time for me came when I was about 10 or 11 years old and I learned that my father collected secret journals in which he'd keep all sorts of original quotes and poems he'd written. He'd been writing for years apparently, most likely longer than I've existed, but I presume he never felt the need to share something that he felt was private and that wouldn't easily be understood.

I never asked. I didn't question the why's or the how's and my father didn't question me either the day I picked up one of his journals and tried to make sense of what he had put into words. There were a lot of passages about time, a couple of lines here and there about true love. Lie I will not, poetry is complex and without having lived through the experience being painted, you can really only imagine what those emotions must have felt like to the author. Even as a pre-adolescent, I'd been through my fair share of heavy emotional struggles that I chose not to talk about because like my father, I developed an early habit of bottling up my feelings until the point of overflow.

I gave writing a chance because I wanted to and I looked onto those same pages I didn't understand all too well as a starting point. My father never pressured me to follow in his footsteps, calmly and without judgment he again and again read the jarred lines I'd managed to come up with (a teenager's attempt) and simply nodded when he was done.

"I'm writing my autobiography," he told me one day. There was a faint child's glimmer in his eyes as he talked about long, buried anecdotes and experiences he'd been through when he was more or less my age. And each time I'd ask him when he'd finally be done he'd pragmatically respond, "one day."

Unfortunately, that day never came. Only a few years after those conversations, my father suffered a series of strokes that left him with permanent brain damage, hindering his ability to ever move, walk, see, or form a coherent thought process like he used to. Losing my father, as I'd known him all my life, is one of the most devastating experiences I've ever been through and the fact that my mother recently suffered her first stroke is daunting.

My father no longer reads or writes, but in honor of his teachings, I write because I wholeheartedly enjoy it. I'm not an author and I'm far from it. My nature I don't feel can be labeled in one category or another. I write simply and because it brings me happiness.