A word on my addiction to the letter.

There was a point, and I remember it well, when I had no clue what these shapes meant. I could hardly tell them apart. Squiggles all the same. Upon investigation, most of the children around me began to notice differences in the makeup of these glyphs. Some were a stick with arms, others were a circle with a tail.

My observations were cluttered. I saw a storm of lines and mutated 5 armed stick pests with double tails. I could grab the shape of a letter for a half second and then it would combine itself with the letter next to it, above it, and suddenly Im looking at a storm of shapes. Look away. Look back, and its back to a normal page. 

This confusion was not only obstructing the intake center of my literacy, but the output aswell. I would drum up a poignant sentence, logical and clear, and lay my pencil to the paper. Out comes what was described to me as 'Completely  illegible gibberish', but only moments ago was a thought. with meaning. I can't exactly remember my thinking proccess at the age of 6, or 4 or 7, but there had to be some sort of meaning in the things I said. Some part of my soul telling my brain what to say, or coming to an agreement. Most likely being forced to meet in the middle. I know for a fact I've always been eager to speak my mind. This must be some inherent trait. I alot the feeling to my physical nerve centers more so than my decision making ones. Its a tensing of the muscles and boiling of the blood, where your brain is the third man, and is willing to go along for the ride. It must have existed then, but what could it have been I wanted to share? I knew so little. My best guess is that it manifested itself on the opposite side of things. As questioning. Im told that as a little one, I 'Wouldn't shut up with the questions'. Asking about the parts of machines what I didn't know the name of. Or asking WHY is the porch light and the street light two separate colours? or WHY the lines in the road were yellow. Often my family didn't have the answer, and I couldn't blame them. Even then I knew my mode of thinking was different, and the questions were a long shot. When I did get answers I held on the them. Anytime they would come up, even remotely mentioned, I would project and launch my little fact forth. This is where the evolution of this trait began. From questioning to sharing, or in another way, blindly following my instincts.

This early interest in the world and what it had to offer gave me a frustration with my literary stunt. Why the hell can't I figure this one out? Why is this puzzle so much harder to solve than that of the way a spring works, or that fathers were hollow. I was plagued by this for some years.

Since then I've managed to overcome almost every bit of it, and in doing so formed a sort of obsession with the word, the sentence, the string of shapes that transports information, thought, emotion. Warning. The word and I are almost on the same side now, though there are still a few beaches to storm. Filling out applications and tax forms brings me directly back to the times when I was blind to these shapes. Its the boxes and lines they paste all over the damn things. One look at the page and they all start swaying and moving, switching around. I almost have to hold on to the table to steady them. It takes a while to decipher the grid, but i manage through it. I think its this near understanding of words that keeps me interested. The chase. If it was all clear to me I wouldn't have to write. I would just sleep.