All Talk

I recall the days when I discerned that all I wanted in life is to be a writer. A sophomore in a well-known university and surrounded by peers who had the same vision and hope for themselves outside the campus, we talked after classes in the soccer field digging Hemingway and Gabo. We yakked also all about the books that we had just read and if we understood them well. The discussion would last until the guards in blue would shoo us to go home because it was already late in the night.

Those were the days. I was surrounded by peers who write when they reached home while what I seemed to do then was to yak about wanting to be a writer. I finished my college days still not knowing how to write. I remember that we were known to be good writers but probably that was true for my peers. But not for me because I could not even get myself write past the first sentence. English language is a hard boulder to chip and I was getting nowhere understanding it.

I remember this remote past for what I seem to do right now is rest on my laureates of getting published by some magazines and winning some writing prizes. Everyone in the neighbourhood knows that I write, that I am a writer.
But if only they knew that I no longer write as much as I used to do then. Nor read for that matter. I’m getting in the full cycle of being a talker rather than being a true writer.

I still have to write that first story that would be published with my byline, something which is due for more than a decade already. The sad part is that there is still no material for me to work on so that promise to myself is still far from reality.

Right now, a lot of things, practical responsibilities have been making me busy. I’m on the look out for a good writing job which is hard to come by. And while it is making me busy, I’m getting lazy trying to write.

But everybody is still calling me a writer. Something that is not true right now because I’m more of a talker.