I LOVE YOU

September 2023. Though in August of 2023 an idea found its fertile soil and the first tentative roots took hold in the shape of the first three to five written pages, it was September when the momentum gathered pace, and devotion to the writing routine and newly established artistic identity had become my defining syntax.

It all started with the library… or maybe in the library. To my luck, the library was just across the road, so when I finished my university classes, it took me no more than five minutes to arrive there. Owing to how heavy my Lenovo laptop was, I didn’t use to carry it around with me all the time. I would use the public workstations instead.

The first week of September, I would settle into one of the free seats available there, the matter of availability being somehow almost always a subject of debate, given that there were fewer than ten functioning computers for public use. My hand would dip into the canvas bag, emerging a moment later with a leather-bound notebook of weathered chestnut, and I would copy and paste the unexpectedly created prose content from August from one physical space into the other, digital one.

Here, I must show my gratitude to Google Drive for serving as the system that preserved all the creative work I was bound to produce from that month onward. Back in time, it had been WriterDuet software that had taken accountability for such a task, the very software that vanished from my life the moment the ability to write screenplays had abandoned me first.

It would be a shameless deception on my part if I were to say that, that September of 2023, I knew what I was doing. I was coming to that library as its regular guest, no, guest is such a wrong word here… I was visiting that newly established writing hub akin to how a professional athlete would visit their training area, their gym, their stadium.

Though, perhaps the word that fits here better is ‘possessed,’ but even that I can’t tell for sure, or can I?

If you have arrived at this piece of the article only after fully absorbing the text of its prior six predecessors, then I dare conjure that you have already marked the logic behind one’s obsession, the pattern behind one’s tendency to become possessed. Here, that one being no other than me myself, of course. I dare to entertain that possibility owing to the fact that, to come this far in reading all the pieces of this one long article, you did not surrender to ennui, did not succumb to tedium. True, it is plausible that there were moments when you wished for this article to represent one compiled chapter, as to ensure that the ending came immediately, as to know that the finish line ended where it had taken its very beginning. Instead, though, you might have felt drawn, no, I meant drown into the chain of the never-ending narration, the ever-ceasing storyline. Perhaps, at some point you even asked yourself:

Of course, there is a high likelihood that you asked none of that. If so, I bring my apologies for speaking on your behalf of what was not on your mind.

I wish that, just as I did with the series of articles for the third novel of mine called ‘I Made a Clone of You,’ I could insert the timetable of the exact word count documentation achieved throughout the first month of that autumn here as well. Yet the earliest date I have is this:

You might be curious as to why I didn’t keep records of my word count milestones throughout the autumn of 2023, the earliest date ironically coinciding with the last day of the last month of that season.

Truth be told, it didn’t occur to me. It didn’t strike me as a necessity, as a possibility, as a system a writer should keep, to record everything they wrote, when and where.

Juggling between tutoring others, finishing my studies, and adapting this one story from its screenplay mode into its prose form, I didn’t forget about the different promise I had made back in the summer of 2023.

There was one friend I found at this new educational establishment, the closest one to me in age, and perhaps even in mindset, if putting the word ‘intellect’ there would be too much of an arrogance, an arrogant demeanor on my part.

(Mind you, the people with whom I shared classes were at most younger than me by almost half a decade; hence, if in the above parts there was indeed something that might have been insulting, it was definitely directed at me rather than them.)

As it happened, this new acquaintance of mine, only two years younger than me, was but four weeks into her newly minted marriage, and not yet pregnant. On her suggestion, we used to go to that one coffee shop where we would agree to study the Mandarin language… mainly through characters.

In that pursuit… in that regard, my intellectual curiosity was far from performative. Though throughout my school years, both secondary and high, and then even at my former university, not even the glittering fascination had ignited in me toward this, the most widespread Asian language, and not even once had I reckoned that surrendering oneself to the wonders of this linguistic tongue would be a great idea, could be a thrilling rollercoaster, this time my interest in it was anything but pretentious or factitious.

I had been interested in many languages, starting with Hindi and Persian, leading toward European treasures like French or Spanish. They came naturally. No. Me… I… I gravitated toward them on my own accord. I found them only because they found me first.

And that time, from summer into autumn of 2023, Mandarin also passed into the company of those who welcomed me. Perhaps it didn’t welcome me nicely enough, politely enough, meaningfully enough, because in such a short span of time, the coffee shop spot that was initially supposed to become the hub of my Mandarin journey transformed into the one where ‘Blackbird Whisper’ continued living. ‘Continued living’ is the wrong word here, as the better fit would be to say: it continued to fight for its life by growing a completely different and new skin.

I ought to have remembered that the most infamous creature known for this ability, for its capacity to shed and change skins, was a snake.

Perhaps, ‘Blackbird Whisper’ has always been a snake that I mistakenly assumed fed me its nectar, its honeydew, when in fact it has always been a venom that it fed me, only to keep spreading through my body, my mind, my heart.