Courage on Cloud Nine

Today's Soundtrack: brave or blinded, not sure which am I

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For the past five, give or take, six years, I’ve been reading this guy’s journal. I don’t know him, and I doubt my universe will ever meet his; but his fears, his perceived inadequacies are all too familiar to me.

He’s an off-and-on freelance writer who developed a strong readership with his
relationship column for men on A-avenue. These loyal souls surf on to his livejournal very often and leave comments and their two cents regularly. Some even financed his trip to B.C.; his end of the bargain was to capture what he saw in megapixels and to transcribe the ins-and-outs of his trip on his journal. Needless to say, he didn’t disappoint.

His journal provides me with a daily dose of escapism. I love seeing New York with his words. Its crowded streets, the dirty subway trains with routes named after numbers and letters, but most of all the characters in his own world, with their own colours, shapes and idiosyncrasies. Even though I’m a regular visitor of the Big Apple, sometimes I can’t help but think that my love affair with the city started with his entries.

Some days I wish I knew the guy, maybe I could drop him an e-mail to encourage him to finish that book. Every writer has *that* book, the one that you’ve been slaving over since you were a teenager, the same one that you want to transform into a short story so you can live to see it in print. Yes, that one. The very same one that some are afraid to finish in the fear that it might actually suck. Mine is written on scattered pages of numerous spiraled notebooks buried in boxes stored in my closet. Some parts come out in my scribbled poetry on scrap paper I seem to dig up everytime I clean my drawers. I wish he could learn what I'm trying to learn. I wish I could tell him that even if his dream flops at some best-sellers list, the satisfaction that he would get at finishing and sharing his written work will surpass any “failure” measured by dollars and cents.