Back for good.

Returning to Writing After an Absence.

It happens slowly at first, then all at once. The days slip by, unmarked. At first, you tell yourself it’s temporary. A busy week, an illness, a small crisis that requires attention. Then a month passes, then six. Writing becomes something other people do, something you once did, long ago. The act itself—pressing words into the pliable dark—begins to feel foreign, suspect, almost absurd.

I have always been interested in absences. Not just the gaps themselves but the way they distort what surrounds them, how they warp a life from the inside out. A forced absence from writing is like a missing pane of glass in a greenhouse. The structure remains, but the wind gets in, and suddenly everything inside is at the mercy of the weather. Without writing, my mind becomes crowded with unspent words, restless and looping. Thoughts grow barbed and unwieldy. I find myself collecting ideas in the way a magpie collects foil: shiny, useless, hidden away.

But how to begin again? This is the trouble. There is no ceremony for returning, no prescribed ritual. You sit at your desk, open the notebook, the laptop. The words do not come. Instead, shame rises like damp through old wallpaper. Who were you to think you had anything to say? Worse, who are you now, after so long in the wilderness?

I think of writers who lost years, whole decades. Jean Rhys drifting through poverty in Cornwall, unread and forgotten until Wide Sargasso Sea lifted her back into the light. Walser in his sanatorium, scribbling on scraps of paper no one would decode until long after his death. Something in me resists these stories, resents them. I do not want to be a tragic figure, lost to silence. I want to write. But wanting is not enough.

So I begin again in the only way I know how: badly. I write a sentence, then another. They are not good sentences. They falter, they repeat themselves. They lack the bright intensity of the words I used to write, before the absence. But here is the secret no one tells you—writing is never as good as you remember it being. It is always a little clumsy, always a little disappointing. And yet, there it is, a mark in the silence, a crack in the dark.

I go on. Slowly, at first. I relearn the motions, the small joys. The way ink thickens on a page. The sound of keys clicking in the quiet. The pleasure of a sentence that turns unexpectedly, as if it has a mind of its own. Writing is not a thing that leaves you, not really. It only goes quiet, waiting for you to find your way back.