Chronicles of a search: Becoming

We are the stories we tell about ourselves.

I am one of those writers in search of a story. That story has not appeared, yet. But I am always crafting one.

In this, it is not the start that confounds me. It has already begun - I am in it! The reason I have never written because I can not end it. 

Because I lack courage. Around me, so many stories begin and end everyday. In fact, I also see beginnings are endings too. But I still can't write about it. Happily-ever-after is cliché, death or departure is beyond contemplation, something dramatic is too unreal! In that sense, I live in the precipice of the story, that kind of safe bourgeois existence where nothing really should happen.

Therefore, I am just going from chapter to chapter. But the script is becoming quite predictable now. Characters seem to be desperate for something to happen now. The narrative is becoming one of those overextended TV series whose writers have run out of ideas. Something got to happen - and I am waiting.

Of course, if one looks at this from the outside, all safe, predictable etc., no chasm will be visible. The point of life, from a non-writer perspective, is to have no point. Everything is set: Norms to follow, acts to perform, self-evident formula of happiness and sadness! The stories are for movies, or for people who we don't know, or expect not to know. From other times, other places! Or of beings who are outside these norms. 

And then something happens. Happened to me - a door was unlocked! I could see I was living in a book. Suddenly, everything was irrationally teleological - the whole universe locked in some sort of conspiracy! For me, without a clue about the end, it was one of those monster novels. It lacks epic-worthy heroics and constant march of characters, so this goes on much like a stream of consciousness story. But that one little crack of light showed me that there is something, perhaps an unfinished novel in the tradition of great central European masterpieces somewhere.

But more I search for an appropriate ending, the story becomes me. It invites me to leave, become a different person. To do something stupid, irrational. Departures - not ends, but change of conversation. Perhaps of place, of context. Of what I need or want.

Hence, I am waiting. To find the story by changing the story. Desperately trying to get out of the story so that I can see it from the outside, as a story. Then I can perhaps end it. Then it becomes a story. Then I become its writer.