The ‘creator’

Nighttime in Baguio is cold, dark, and still, but I urged myself to stay for a little while on my table beside the window. It’s moment like this that ideas, events, people, feelings, what- ifs, sadness, and ecstasy come to my mind like rapids and I feel so alive. It’s maddening, tiring, gratifying, and very significant to me. I was supposed to begin another chapter for a book I was working on, but for inexplicable reasons, I started typing why I want – and need – the responsibility to create stories.
I create them to soothe my overworked mind. I create them to show how I turn situations from pure happiness to pure darkness. I create them because I can dominate them. I create them to give people the promise of love. I create them hoping that it would make a ruckus. I create them to share my veiled thoughts and desires.
I create them so that I can satiate my desperate heart. Because for the first time, I felt a reciprocated love. And then I was being lied to. I create again as a form of diversion and deliberation. I create to overwhelm people’s hearts.
I create them to prove a point – then be appraised. It’s also to revere creating. I create them to reach a certain destination which I wasn’t sure of and to envisage and assess the limits of my intellect.
Creating is a way for me to discard the past and bequeath a legacy for the future.
I create because I want to give birth to ideal characters, to be one with them. I create them to torture myself of the things that I had lost and deeds I should have done. I create them as a response to that entrancing song I’ve heard. I create them for my parents, the ones who gave birth to my story. It’s also to the man I had lost and the boy who had lost me. I create them to beat the pensive sadness caused by my lonesomeness.
I create them as an aide-memoire of that single instance where I felt appreciated. I create them because I had no other endowment. I create them because I can’t stop it – the feeling, the conception, and the promise of a blissful ending even if I bleed with words and drown myself with plot twists and writer’s blocks. It’s the single, most influential flair I had with this tedious, beaten, and predictable life.
It’s in the stories I wrote that I had dared to kiss his lips; I had uttered her words of buoyancy; I had given him that slap signifying my wrath; I wrote her a promising song; I painted him in his nakedness; I crushed her heart with my malevolent words or I have put myself as the leading figure, where I had constantly ended up with what I deserved, no matter how coward, dejected, and pained I am by the many twists of fate I had sustained – things that I can’t do with this life I am presently living. I take out my frustrations with the stories I create, and turn them into my own magnum opus ready to take part in the world.
I create stories in honor of my understanding that life itself is an intricate story and I am one character suffering, existing, facing, and crafting my chronicle. — SOPHIA JOYCE L. PAGADUAN