An Apology

 For a moment my mind goes totally blank and then my hands find a few keys to strike. I strike them and suddenly this, whatever this is, starts to write itself.

I once had a nightmare when I was little. I feared I would be forgotten. I wanted to remain in the minds of some people. I wanted to not be forgotten. But then, I read The Killing Joke by Alan Moore and I realised that Joker was on point when he said that memory is treacherous. We remember a lot of things without wanting to and we forget a lot of things without meaning to. I wished for a powerful dagger like the one Prince Dastan had in Prince of Persia, but that would have been me giving vent to my hubris and even in Prince of Persia if you run out of sand for the dagger, you die. 

I grew older and people whose corporeal forms I had interacted with became ectoplasm in pockets of my mind and I stayed a dreamer. I dream of them and of their stories and I tell others of their stories. 

I am not a good writer, but if you take away stories from me, my mind will revolt and trash and struggle like a cornered animal, a deer that freezes in the headlights of a speeding car driven by a man who has had one too many beers and is driving home in the cold sleet of an oncoming European winter.

I think I've realised what this is. This is an apology to the nightmare I had when I was little. I think that somewhere is a house and in that house resides all the ideas that I have forgotten about. They are cripples. Some do not have legs or hands. Some do not know how to talk. Drunk on the ambrosia of creative adrenaline, I went too far with some of them, danced with only Diz and Dante and left Lucy somewhere in the sky without any diamonds. I think those ideas hate me. They feel they were not good enough for me. But then again, they forgave me and did not make me forget that I could learn to be a good writer. Those abandoned ideas sent more ideas to me and some of those ideas turned into non treacherous memories. 

More importantly, the graveyard where the ideas that didn't even see the part of the world I had created for them and died in birth lies to the north east of the house, in permanent repose. Those corpses haunt me in a different way. They make me run to books, and through books to stories. They fuel the ever consuming fire in me to make love to the written word, to disappear into a mythical world when the real one is too unkind. My love for stories lives on, as my attempt at winding up this apology slips away from me. My tired mind sips lukewarm tea and my phone reminds me that I need sleep. 

But I can't sleep. I have promises to keep.

I wonder if the ideas will accept this apology. 

The Bilge Master