Dedication

Mood: Pensive
Music: Night and Day - Frank Sinatra
Date: Monday, March 29th, 2010

I feel like we've been on a journey these past couple of months, I feel like our relationship has grown beyond a mere courtship of carefully-worded sentences and witty turn of phrases crafted into imagery. These months, we've been having a conversation, you and I. Let's face it, when I'm really in the mood - I come here and rant to you. You listen without judgement, taking in my words and crafting your own witty retorts which you whisper in my ear through the beauty that is technology.


What started out as a fun and light-hearted affair, has turned into something more meaningful. I tell you about my pain, my heartache, my hopes, my dreams...the things that make me the happiest...all the things I wouldn't feel comfortable telling you to your face. But in a way, isn't this a face-to-face conversation we have been having? I admit it's often one-sided, but I feel you really listen to me and in some ways you get a glimpse of me that no friend or lover has. It is one thing to see me cry over a love lost, or grasp my naked hips in a moment of passion - it's another thing to read the words straight from my mind. In some ways, our relationship is more defined than any other I have...that bond between you my reader and me the writer.

I cannot remember the first thing I wrote, I'm sure in retrospect it must have been ghastly and poorly written, but the whimsical part of me likes to think of that first written piece as a seedling. A seedling nurtured by persons I met along the way - teachers, friends, associates, avid readers on-line that I've never met. As long as I've been self-aware, I've self-identified as a writer. I cannot imagine being anything but a writer. If I ever write a novel, as I've often been told I should - I might dedicate it to my parents. The dedication will read: "To my parents: who have never read anything I've written, nor asked to."

My father says I have a long and very unforgiving memory, and he's right. I do. I don't easily forget the wrongs that have been done to me, and this is something I'm trying to change about myself. I take things to heart when they're acts committed by someone I care about deeply.
He said this last summer, when I told him that he is the reason I will never take my writing seriously - no matter how much praise is lauded on me. When I was about 11 or so, he asked what I wanted to do with my life. My memory is so good, that I remember the exact place and general time - I remember exactly what we were doing when he asked. I told him I wanted to write. He let out a wry chuckle and told me I'd never make a living as a writer - to pick something else. I never forgot that - not because I was young and impressionable but because it was just another in the string of comments that made me feel unworthy in the eyes of my parents. This is something I would struggle with for the next 8 years.

The age of 19 is when I decided to give up on my parents - not because they wouldn't change but because I had changed. I had reached the point where I no longer cared what they thought about it. It was the year I took a job neither of them approved of and decided to quit doing Mass Communications (which I only started because I was determined to prove to my father that I could make it as a writer). And that was the year I fell in love with a boy that I would never bother to introduce to either of them while he and I were still together.
I have never introduced a boyfriend to my parents, contrary to what they think since they assume all the men they meet are my boyfriends. At 19, I stopped caring what my parents thought, and at 19 I realised that no matter what I did, I would never make them happy.

That novel might never get written, and I may never get over the (semi)writer's block I've been experiencing for the past few years...but I feel if I did, that dedication to my parents would be fitting. The only way either of them will ever hear an original piece written by me is against their wills at their respective funerals. What I wrote and read at my grandfather's funeral doesn't count, because as lauded as it was by my family, it was a smoke screen for my inability to write something sincere and true. I believe if you can't say something nice about someone, you shouldn't say anything at all. I didn't know my grandfather well, and he was a ghastly man who the first time I met him, he screamed at me for no good reason. Since I couldn't say anything nice about him, I wrote a piece cataloguing things I had seen him do over the years: sitting on his verandah drinking, tending to his orchids and his love of cats. Those three things are the only thing I have in common with my grandfather - however I do not drink alone, my poor orchid is dying, and my apartment is not cat-friendly no matter how much I long to have a cat.

The novel's dedication might be fitting, but I think as much as I don't long for their approval, it would be nice if they asked me - their only child together - if they could read something I've written. However, since I know they won't: I keep writing as if they'll never read it which gives me a certain freedom to be honest about them - which I'm sure a lot of writers wish they had.

Love,
Ally.

Photo Credit: "Love is when two people know everything about each other and are still friends"; March 19th, 2010. Photo taken by Curragon Lights Photography