What I Lost When I Lost my Words

There's years between me and the time I felt I still had the words to be a writer. 

I always felt, that when I left my country for the UK, I had to leave so much more behind at the customs than just my nail scissors. 

I have to think of the scene from the beginning of the movie Marie Antoinette, where the heroine arrives in France, and has to strip naked and leave every single thing she owned behind. Adopt a new identity in a new country. This scene is burned deep into my memory. 

Having to shift to a different language feels very similar when you've built you're identity on being a writer. 


That first year was hard. I spent it mostly translating my novella to death. The second year I gave up on fiction and wrote poems that were doomed from the start. The words felt cold and foreign on my tongue, and awkwardly stared back at me from the prison page in front of me.

After that I wrote songs. 

But the last 18 years have been soaked in the knowledge I have become someone else. The real me is liquid ink. A writer before everything else. The real me would feel a thrill when looking down the barrel of a gun, impatient for the opportunity to translate the experience into words.

I've no literary ambitions anymore, but I have to ease myself back into writing again. It's less of a choice, but a storm that I can't contain. A raging reclaiming of the parts of my soul I considered lost.

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