Some days the writing can be a pain. You sit facing the blank page but it feels like wringing water out of a towel that’s already been out days under the sun. I don’t wish to belabor the metaphor any further, but sometimes wringing that towel can be easier in the winter. Maybe things just seem more poetic in the cold.
The wife has been out a few hours now. Since moving into the apartment and starting my first full time job in the country, this has been our routine. I wake up ahead of her to get breakfast started. When she’s ready and looking beautiful as always, I see her out to work. Why do the women in our lives always look their prettiest when they have to leave? Anyway, I walk with her as far as the mailbox downstairs. When she disappears past the corner that turns toward the bus stop, I come back up and get the coffee that’s been left simmering on the hot plate. I have about an hour to write before I need to clock in to my job, which I do remote.
Today I have more time, given that it’s a long holiday. The Japanese call it their golden week (ゴールデンウィーク): a succession of national holidays that the sarariman all over the country try to take advantage of to go on camping trips and so forth as apparently working holidays come few and far in between this side of the Pacific. It starts with Showa Day on April 29 (昭和の日) and ends with Greenery Day (みどりの日) and Children’s Day (こどもの日) on May 4 and 5. It amuses me to no end the kind of holidays that will be cooked up in a country short on religious ceremonies and heroes to remember. Over the last three years my wife and I would try to make use of this to go on quick sight-seeing trips across the lesser known parts of Japan, but this time there’s not enough cash to go around. We’re still hurting from the moving costs and my first salary is still a few weeks away. So we stay at home (or in her case, she works), and I am writing.
Or at least trying to write. It’s amusing because since starting my job I feel like I’ve finally had the time and the space to write, unlike at any other point in my life after college. I thought it would be same when I entered the doctoral program at NAIST, given how undemanding the day-to-day schedules were, but it’s just too hard to sneak in the time when your life is that unstructured. I might not have had classes to attend to or week-to-week deadlines to meet, but I did have code to write, and papers to submit to this conference and that journal. Writing block may not be a regular symptom to a programmer, but the job still drains you of energy. And writing demands a sustained concentration of energy not just once, but over and over again across days, weeks, and even years.
Back in college the deadlines might have been more numerous, and tighter, but it gave me the skeleton of a schedule in which I was free to fill in the blanks. I read through the commute between Caloocan and Quezon City. I spent two-hour intervals between classes at the Main Library, writing either longhand inside the reading room, or typing up drafts at the computer room. The writing did not come any easier back then, but it had the space and the time to do so. The muse is finnicky, but if you give her a schedule she comes on time.
These days it’s been like that again. My remote job also allows me to work on flexi-time, so I’m free to clock in however early or late as I choose, and I choose 8AM, which naturally aligns well with the wife’s schedule and has the added bonus of letting me clock out at 5PM. I am up at 7AM and with Scrivener open on my desktop. In between sips of hot coffee I try to wring this towel for all it will give, and at this rate it’s a story draft in a couple of weeks, or a revised page on my work-in-progress novel in one. The writing is still difficult. It’s only been a few weeks and the muse hasn’t yet received the memo about our new schedule.
Back in college I really wanted to leave the (economic) certainty of Statistics behind and shift to creative writing. I was starting to feel confident in my skills as a writer of prose and I wanted to see it further, to see how far that rocket can fly. Thankfully everyone that mattered and had authority in my life told me no: even my creative writing teacher, encouraging as she always was with my writing, told me to stay where I was. I promised myself I’ll get back on that rocket eventually, if not as the only endeavor in my life. I would be like Chekhov, I would say back then. Statistics would be my wife, and writing the mistress. I promised to take an MA in either Comparative Literature. I promised to get a highly structured corporate job and write on the side. Obviously none of those things happened (until now) and life sort of just took over.
And once again I’m glad that it did. I’m writing again, so there was no harm. Only I’m inching closer to my thirties and with my novel still half-baked and with no prospects of publication. I would never be the rock-star early twenty debut author gracing the broadsheets with my good looks and even better prose, like in my fantasies of once upon a time. But if I’m being realistic I was never going to be a Fitzgerald or a Hank Moody anyway. I had nothing to write about! At twenty-one I was still scribbling the poorly plotted musings of a college debutant who read long books and went to indie music concerts, smoking cigarettes because it looked serious, and peppering in some magic realism because it works sometimes but not because of any deeper symbolic or literary effect.
I might have done that into oblivion if I didn’t have that second life – or really that first life, that plot A that got me through a master’s in Statistics, and conference trip to Japan, and then a more or less permanent move overseas as a doctoral student, an immigrant. I got to see realities beyond the imaginings I obsessed myself with in books. And as the disillusionment crept in, and time lent my childhood optimism and comfort a patina of doubt and regret, I believe I finally found my voice.
Dominic Dayta 
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