Of Pens and Pixels

My pockets are always bulky. 

My right would contain my beloved camera and my breast pocket would contain my handy pens.

 These two things are rarely out of my reach. Whenever I need them, I am confident that I’d be able to find them and use them for whatever I needed them for.

 My camera is a Canon SX100 IS, black and compact, but sophisticated enough to take pictures that satisfy me. My pens are a variety…and I have to have them at all times, or I wouldn’t feel “complete”, and at a sense of unease. How so? Well, I need a retractable black pen for the usual official hospital documents we have to make, an orange or yellow (sometimes both) highlighter for marking names, a pencil for writing certain little notes here and there, a green soft-point pen for underlining [important] things in my books and fifth, but definitely not the least, a pen of White-out (liquid eraser), necessary for the little mistakes we can patch up as needed.

 I take a lot of pictures, by nature, and I write a lot.

 Ever since I was little, I had this desire, although in varying degrees, to preserve things that were happening around me, or to me. When I was seven years old, I started a diary where I wrote every little important thought, every little sparkle of inspiration that hit me deep.

 From an early age, I was akin to scribbling away on little notebooks. I was a bit of an introvert most of the time, taking liberty in slowing things down and observing things more closely that I should have at my age.

 I would then write about what I thought about certain things, without concern for syntax or rightness, neither caring whether or not my entries were too corny. Which they undeniably were, of course.

 When I was seven, I wrote in a diary about this boy in class that I thought was particularly interesting and good-looking. An older cousin, a girl, playfully teased me. My father overheard, and he got irked and muttered something about how I shouldn’t be having a boyfriend because I was only seven.

 Thinking back on it, I have to laugh. How preposterously overboard can a dad get, huh?

 (Quite a bit, actually. :-p)

 That taught me to keep my thoughts to myself, to cherish them and remember them, but to keep them and put them away for a later time.  My memories, and a good part of my young heart are stored in pages and pages of smooth notebook paper, kept in a box deep in a cabinet. Reading a few lines brings every happiness, every hurt, every mirthful laughter back in crystal clear detail every time.

 My camera serves the same purpose. I take pictures, lots of them. Never ever to embarrass anyone by posting them online, but to serve as visuals for moments in life that meant a lot. Or didn’t.

 My camera serves the same purpose as my pen. I don’t snap away because I’m a photographer who documents every event…rather, I take pictures because I want to remember faces, and happiness and triumph and precious seconds of joyous or sorrowful emotion that no other medium would allow me the freedom to.

 Basically, you could think of me as a chronicler…a storyteller who takes the little moments of life, whether they be serious or not, seriously.

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 When I was younger, I had this silly dream of being a lovely old lady, in my sixties or seventies, being surrounded by little grandchildren who wanted to hear stories about “how things were like way back when…”. And in my dream, in answer, I’d smile, with a twinkle in my eye, and pick a random story, and maybe tell her about the time, once upon a time, when I found myself standing at the foot of a very big ferris wheel, with twinkling lights, holding the hand of a boy who I had loved then, with all my heart, and how it turned out to be not so scary a ride, at all? Or that maybe, I could tell her about the people I had met in the hospital, who had, in one way or another taught me about life? Or, I could tell her about the time, when  she was born and that I had helped deliver her?

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I can’t wait, really. :-p

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When Ligaya put up the topics for this month’s blog rounds, I was initially excited…the  theme was so…free, and it felt like I could write anything at all, and not be encumbered by any “theme”, so to speak. As I sat in front of the pc, with fingers poised over the keys, I realized that…yes, my fingers had remained that, poised over the keypads, waiting for some divine inspiration to hit me and set my words into flow…

Like life, writing doesn’t come easy… a blank piece of paper that we all start with, puts us on the brink of a new challenging beginning. As with every other project, every major undertaking that comes our way, we have to start with a plan. And we have to start with a clean sheet.