THE SALT BENEATH ME

It was night—winter of 2021. I had been feeling the absence of creative vision, along with the wish to create something, although I was unsure what it would be and how it would come to be. I was waiting for the spring of urges to begin. And in this night, it came out of the blue. I saw a face, a character, and in front of closed eyes, quite like the projection of a nebulous film, I watched a scene form. I let it happen, and focused on letting the details of the setting sharpen and be tinted and grow layers. Then a storyline came, and though it was slight and unfledged and brief, I had the feeling to start writing it down. I sat up, let the lamp glow, and noted down the opening of this story. Moments passed, more ideas came. I didn't want to lose it so I kept on writing and turning pages as the night grew and soon thinned into early morning. It was only some months before this night that I had revived my childhood love of reading, that I had opened the door to literary arts. And I hadn’t ever written this way. This was a new sensation. When I got to the end, I realised I had the skeletal plot of a story I was surprised to love. And I knew I wanted to write it, that I couldn’t ignore it. So I did—I put the first sentences on a blank page and returned to it every other day to add more. Details were emerging, little moments between the threads of larger ones, and I soon realised it was going to be a novel. Writing a book had always been something I’d like to do at some point, but I didn’t expect it to be then. Nor did I know that soon I would find myself so lost in the formation of it that it would follow me everywhere I went, for the next seventeen months, that here and there, whenever I had free time, I’d add pieces and pieces. Until it became whole.
Writing this story made me find my literary voice. It showed me how writing can be like painting, and the playing of music. It showed me how often others inspire me. And how much there is circling the imagination, all at once.