It was Sunday when I totally landed on the floor, hitting my rock bottom, realizing that I may need to take a different route in my novel again. All along, I dodged one essential point: what the novel is about. It is so hard to say. At times, I know all the aesthetics, the words, the feelings, the theme, and the vividness of every scene, like I painted it, but I do not know what I am writing about. Or I know what I am writing about, but I do not know what it is that I am writing about. I reworked the previous fragments and recycled them, glued them together into one piece, and some of them formed into short stories. I wanted to show the life of Aleph, an artist in her late 20s. She is writing this novel, so a part of the novel is metafiction. But another part of the novel is her process, this dissociative, isolated life that is sprawled into madness and into our fiction. How much I see in Aleph, someone I know well? Who?Sama. It was so tricky to put this together, and I am afraid, I am afraid of throwing away these ideas like the other ideas, into the garbage. I really wanted to stick with this, to show my commitment throughout all the drafts, throughout all the failures, throughout all the heartbreaks of not being able to realize this. So what now? What is it that I do not get right? One thing that did not work was that I sacrificed a plot for a particular nocturnal mood and existentialism, without a storyline, or… yeah. I thought I could find a form that could contain the type of writing I want to do. I think this version lacks world-building and character development. I am happy to see it now, though. Anyway, the irony here is that my novel began to form partially in my mind when I could not see, during the time that I had temporary blindness. And that meant something much bigger. I had a misfortune, an unlucky moment, in the summer, when I felt so miserable. Maybe it wanted to warn me about the way I tend to see the world, often taking it too seriously, with a sense of paranoia that people want to conspire to hurt me. Believe me. At the same time, I am driven by these vague, nonsense-making things because my mind wants to solve them. And what if I allowed some things to remain unknown, mysterious, unresolved? But it is damn hard, isn’t it, when all you want is an answer. An answer, not certainty, but an answer. What is the difference? I am waiting. I am waiting for a turn of things. Returning to the point, a feeling tells me the world is one big comedy show, absurd for sure. How far we go to give meaning to our days and lives, and we get busy with things, and all the funny things that happen day in and day out. The more I take them as a threat, as a serious threat, the more it shakes my entire body, and I become pessimistic. Then it changes my language when I write, and I become one big melodrama queen. Yeah, and I know it, and I do not want it. Not that I do not want it only in my writing, but I do not want it in my mind. I think I lived that part. That part ran its course through me. But it seems that its residues are still here. So today I thought, fuck, fuck the grand narration. Maybe life is a bunch of situational comedy. And that is why, when I see this quote, it makes me think. It makes me think about a lot of stories, a lot of moments that I came across, hurting myself and then laughing.
Through my curtains I can see a big yellow moon. I’m thinking of all the people in the world who will be looking at that same moon. I wonder how many of them haven’t got any eyebrows?
— Louise Rennison
Because life is absurd. Life is a funny, ridiculous, absurd tragedy. And why did I want to write about that temporary blindness, about a night voyage, dreams clashing with an unresolved past? But it did bring me onto a path of observing the past. And it turned out that the way I was seeing my own life was my blindness. And I think I can see again. I can see again at the cost of breaking my heart again, at the cost of starting all over again. A new draft, a new draft, a new draft. Will I ever be able to finish this novel?