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The Shadowy Writer
The one who writes isn’t us
It was 5 a.m., and the world outside my window was still awakening from the shadows of the day before. The quiet was immense yet soothing, a pregnant pause that separated night and day. I wasn’t asleep — not really — but I wasn’t awake either. That strange liminal space where thoughts, like warmed clay, are fluid and pliable. Those moments we feel the chains that have long shackled our minds suddenly vanish.
Like the sunrays of hope and faith and possibilities falling upon us after a triumph over our procrastination, managing to break free of our monotonic unproductive habits and finally did the dishes and cleaned up the kitchen sink.
It was in that moment the idea came, not ferociously like a thunderbolt, but with the soft persistence of a whisper — having, of late, through inspiration and desire, begun to stare nigher into the eye of writing and its mastery; I realized, is not something we achieve.
It is someone we create.
I lay there for a while, the thought unfurling in my mind. It wasn’t a tidy epiphany, no. It came with questions, edges, and cracks. But I held onto it. Turned it over. Looked at it from every angle.
The more I thought about it, the more it made sense. When we dedicate ourselves to a craft, we’re not merely refining…
