notes on turning

Posted on by antheaayang
  1. My current notebook began over a year ago (October 2019, another time / another life) but it is only recently that I have started to write in it again.
  2. Someone in my writing class asks: Do you ever read your old notebooks and realise you’re still writing about the same things? I think about this for weeks.
  3. This was called notes on turning twenty-five before I realised there was no definitive uncurling of a new leaf.
  4. I come back to this months after and call it notes on turning instead because yes, I am still writing about the same things. A different shape, a different weight, but at the heart, yes, the same things:
    A kind of yearning.
    An obliteration.
    Then, a doorway.
  5. The years that led me here do not come to me in chronological order. I write about my open desire for my younger self but, in truth, it is a relief to wake up with a sort of clarity.
  6. The feelings are clear. But now, I wonder, what does it take to be a writer? (See also: what does it mean?)
  7. I delete instagram off my phone and recognise a calm that washes over me when there isn’t hands and bodies and texts reaching for your attention.
  8. (To exist in the echo of an inside voice.)
  9. Sheila Heti writes, Alone, one feels the whole universe, and none of one’s personality.
  10. I make a mental note on my yearning: To want is not enough. To act, is perhaps the beginning of another story.
  11. Over the phone, a friend tells me, Writing is the most important thing.
  12. These words, a liquid, solidifies.
  13. The changing of states.