when i was younger

Before I left on this trip I blindly copied almost everything I had written onto a flash drive, and stuck the thing in my coat pocket with the hope of perhaps writing something new in these two months, or at least reflecting on what I’d done. It has been almost ten years – ten years! – since I’ve touched these things, a decade since I’ve set eyes on these few and scattered pages.

Sitting now in this cold room in Cinque Terre I read the plays that I started and never finished, the poems that I penned in part and tossed aside – discouraged perhaps by my self consciousness, or my perceived immaturity (but what, in all honesty, seems mature or consequential when you have read Albee, Williams and O’Neill – Tennyson and Keats?). And I feel now a returning warmth of a sudden; a familiar comfort, like smelling on a passing wind some childhood scent, wrapped serpentine around a distant memory.

I read the words I wrote when I was younger, more impressionable perhaps and innocent, and I think about the thoughts I had then – swirling and molten in the burning flows of my adolescent mind – and I wonder in which direction those thoughts were moving, and where they would have led. Because now, ten years later – still young, but so much older – I have trouble remembering what I thought at the time.

Ambassadors To An End – my high school graduation project. A short, one-act play I had written about a wealthy and curious man determined to better understand the human mind, to unlock the secrets of our mortal thought process. I remember enlisting three of my classmates to play the three characters. I remember going with my dad to Home Depot to buy the door frame and the potted plant – the only props in the play – and I remember after-school rehearsals with my advisor, and my naïve attempts at stage direction. Look up slowly, pensively. Look into the distance. Gasp for breath, and writhe! I remember the auditorium and the stage – so vast and daunting; so intimidating to my seventeen years.

But it was so much fun – my first, and to date, only – stage production. And I do remember the applause, courteous and brief, and standing at the podium answering questions from my classmates. How long did it take to write? What kind of things inspire you? Is this something you want to do for a living?

And I remember thinking at the time, and answering “yes – yes, it is.”

And it still is, though perhaps now I’ve matured and realized some of my limitations as a person, and as an artist. And I’ve shed most of my innocence, for sure – and graduated, to a degree, in mind. But still the longing and desire remain.

I am hesitant now to finish what I started, so seemingly long ago. There is no doubt some truth to the thought that an artist’s work should never be revised – that creation in the moment is a reflection of the artist in the moment, and that as the artist grows so too will his work evolve. Perhaps then I will keep the originals, and file them away in memory – and work into something new the fundamentals therein.

And maybe, many more years in the future, I will return again to these various incarnations and reflect upon my mind at seventeen and twenty-six, and smile – and think to myself: “how far you’ve traveled, these years between. How different now your voice, hoarse and weathered by these decades of expression!”

It is a conclusion, and an end, which I think I will enjoy – and until that time, I’ll look forward to its coming.