That time that I stopped writing

Words and images by @serste

I was almost fifteen when I stopped writing.

It happened on a summer day. The kind of lazy hot days that makes me feel that Death is a lie, because anything seems to move, anywhere.

I was in Love.

She was tall, blue eyes, short rat-coloured hair, skinny figure. I especially loved her shoulders, a perfect T; they gave her a sense of authority, totally hiding the rest of her body, to my perception.

Three months earlier, she had confessed to love me during one of our ‘free writing lessons’: we used to seat together at the keyboard, like pianists do, and write exquisite cadavers for hours.

Little stories, streams of consciousness (or unconsciousness, since we were teens), manifestos.

We also used to draw things down.

(Her sticky style should have been a warning.)

I didn’t love her back.

I wasn’t into women, or I should say, I wasn’t into sex.

I had a shit ton of it when I was a child, and I was afraid of the fault-pleasure mechanism I smelled in it.

So I wrote a word, ‘Physiological‘.

Then another one, ‘Impossibility‘.

She wrote something, deleted it, then broke the game by turning her head from the Pentium screen and looking straight at me, at her side.

I felt her sadness, and refused to admit mine: I had lost my best friend.