Ending.

It has been years since I updated my blog. I walk around calling myself a blogger by heart though, I tell people I was only truly happy when I was writing. But, over the last two years a blank text box and a blinking cursor have lost their power over me, they remind me of the other, less comfortable, emotions that gain voice only in the quiet of writing. It is a discomfort that is easy to bury though, in the slurry of cheap social activity. Blogging is nerdy and anti-social, there are people to talk to and things to do. Get up and be out going, the confident people are. The last two years of my life have been pretty good from a confidence perspective, my career took a turn for the awesome, I figured out the conversational widgets that kids normally learn in high-school; to maintain social interactions without over-investing in them. I have friends that like me. Really, life is not all that bad at all. In many ways it is highly bloggable; I am traveling quite a bit, there are at least a couple dozen interesting anecdotes where funny things happened to friends and colleagues; some of them are even up on Youtube.
But still I rarely find the need to document a meal I just had, or a person I just met, or a place I just went too. "People, Things and Places" they say are the starting points for a popular blog. I have never written about any of them. I did ambitiously start blogs to document activities in my life but they either became excercises in English composition or a series of unfinished drafts themed around an interesting picture of birds I took on holiday. But I yearn, yearn so much to write! To feel the sentences form, to force them into well-fitting punctuation.

I am not a blogger of events then, I like to write but I like to write because it is the only way I can read what I am feeling. This craving is the consternation of emotions that are not cool enough to make a dinner table conversation. They are the voices inside that are wispy, fleeting, and bound in emulsion that need grammar and typesetting to precipitate. I remember spending hours to get the words just right, deleting and correcting. Forming my thoughts and then mulling over them before the words appeared on screen. Looking back on my previous posts, there is one thing that is consistent, every post is deeply personal. It is a conversation that was a long time coming with myself, writing is the only way I can get myself to listen.

The paradox however is that, while I wrote for myself, I met the most amazing people through the blog world. Surprisingly everyone I hit it off really well with, enjoyed time with, and let my guard down with are either bloggers or active readers of blogs. Maybe it was because all these people I met had the incite to recognize the same parts of me that my writing helped me discover. Nonetheless, with the people that read my writing and chose to be friends with me, I never felt the need to govern how they see me, it felt scary and exciting that they had read what I write.
But while I enjoyed the friendships spun from my writing, once I knew I was writing for people other than me, the need to write never reached the critical mass to actually make me do it. I have stopped and started many times, I started when my Grandfather died and I needed to feel what I felt and talking did not help. I wrote so many pages then. I wrote again when I graduated and felt like there was nothing in the future to look forward to, a scary black void that terrified me, while the people I could talk to were all quite content in letting their lives acquire trajectory by the providence of their current state. Many more occasions, and now, I write today after two odd years.

Being a young man, my tears need to make up excuses before I can let them come. They are justifying themselves to me and I understand. I am writing as I empathise with them. Something, ended today that they never expected to mourn. They believed I could articulate what I felt so they would not have to do it for me. But I cannot.
I need them to see how important this was, why it needs to be marked and how I can move on from here.

I miss you.