STEPS

CHAPTER TWENTY FIVE Good with words...

My dissatisfaction ever stemming from William - he the one bringing me close, delivering me to the point of almost identifying myself; this after the cataclysm, after the craving death and oblivion. When circumstances finally allowed me to turn inward, to pick up and examine me, the part made up of words. Labelling myself finally. Always afraid to do it in the past, fear born out of the many perceived inadequacies, shortcomings when measured against the visible accomplishments of others.

Yet when I began to write again, these utterances assumed guided by William - each sentence taking me further into myself - I took the first new steps. A writer? Yeah I could call myself this now, rather easily and even with some measure of pride. Thousands of pages created these past few years, never mind I still presumed most of them inadequate, writing, re-writing, and ever unsatisfied. Never mind I acknowledged too, mass creation these days was manufactured, a process adhering to a script - a proscribed formula. Mine ever haphazard, chaotic, dark; reflecting my interpretation of living. What mattered was the acceptance. What mattered was the act of writing, the knowing I was capableof putting words down - good words.

In the space of a month recently, two men uttered the same phrase:

"You were always good with words."

Recalling perhaps the bombardment, the bundles of pages offered up as compensation for lacking the ability to feel, to verbally or physically respond in real time. My offerings always an afterthought - always handed over on paper.

William boasting to my boys when we visited: "Your mother was always good with words!"

I never questioned why he volunteered this observation. The accompanying smile meant only for me, the message within not homage to my talent, rather a warning to take away. William afraid? Had he kept those pages in his memory, detecting in the remembering a persisting relevance? Had he perhaps in the recall admitted, "This is me, this hero, this wise man, this untiring battler? And she saw me and cared enough to tell me so, despite all the odds?"

When I returned from seeing him? God even the brief time spent in his city, the fire reignited unregulated, unopposed. I wrote like some fucking maniac, twenty-something again and he at the peak of his influence. The brief conversation and the too-long embrace sending my mind careening towards conception, seeking some concrete manifestation, desperate to create something new, re-create something old.

Amid this chaos of inception, I neglected to click the 'save' icon. Of course the computer crashed and on resumption revealed only the initial save. Most of my writing gone; the pages ending abruptly, as though words had never further occupied their white space beyond the current one.

"It's your fault," my son said, and launched into a lecture on prevention. Yelling, screaming, I shrieked, "Too late! What if I can never get them back? William needs them!"

"Then tell him!"

"I can't. You don't get it. He'll be expecting these words. On paper."

Yeah. On paper. He'd be expecting to read what the visit had meant, what the unspoken words passing back and forth between us had been translated into by my mind. This handing over repeated so often in the past, it was still assumed a natural consequence.

We tried for hours to recover my emotions. I paced, I cried, I did. Tried to explain to my son how laying down words was everything. Just crashing keys in heated patterns till the sentences built yet another monument. For that's what I had been doing see. Transported to a time and place where only he, I and the words existed, and I built, word after word, another testament, another timeless monument.