I have winnowed the past seven years of my writing into a few select tidbits per month. Now, I am polishing, making final deletions, and indexing. These past two weeks, I poured all of myself into this past. I remember as best I can, I cut to the edge of my heart, and I purify to the extent of my powers: I am reviving my many dead selves.
I did not know what I was doing then, and I barely know what I am doing now.
I ache to see this person arise from my past, drunk with himself, heavy with the Fire against the Night. He is me and he is not me. When I was young, I shot at anyone approaching from the darkness. Older, I have let the fire wane, staring desperately into the night to see who still comes.
Here, as honestly as I can convey it, is the point:
When I was young, the most beautiful things I knew were written, not real—they were words, not people. As I grew older, the wisest things I knew were in books. When I was fifteen, for reasons that are utterly lost to me, I began to write back. As I trusted words the most, I confided far more to my own writings than I ever did to other people.
Now, years later, I find I am without a human past besides shallow memories and seven years of my own logorrhoea. The dream and the delusion is that these words will walk and talk on my behalf; I know they cannot.
In some sense, this project I have embarked on is both a resurrection and a funeral:
I will try despite all to create a character breathing on the page whom a reader can know and love—I want to simulate that history.
At the same time, that person is so fraught with himself that he can barely see past himself. He is insufferable; I have been insufferable. I am ready to kill him. Like Hamlet's father, he comes to me saying, 'Remember what you are! the son of History itself!' I cannot move forward with him at my back. I must put him to rest.
And still, even here, I write assuming that I can make friends with the future from the past of the page. The delusion is that I will remain here in the letters, blood in each syllable, to speak for myself. The dream is that one day—maybe one day soon—that past will grow closer and closer until I am here, sniffling at my ancient keyboard, and you, heavier than ten hundred thousand keystrokes, rush into the room, pull my hands to your mouth, kiss them, and speak the words I was about to type.