The Writer's Oath

When dreams of doing what I (really) loved —writing—would creep up on me, I would kidnap them them, gag them, tie them up and then throw them in the trunk of my car. What were they doing on the well-planned streets of my life anyway? Damn loiterers.

Then I would wrap these vagrant, troublemaker dreams of mine in black garbage bags made of fear, laziness and self-doubt and take them down to the river, to dump them into the water. I would drive down to the riverbank and open the trunk, but I could not bring myself to do it. I tried, but I just couldn’t.

So they remained in the trunk. For years I carried them, driving here, driving there, all the while the dreams trapped in the back, writhing and kicking, wrapped up as they were in those black garbage bags. I tried many times to get rid of them. I wanted to throw them off a cliff, to set them on fire, even to splash acid on them. But I could not even get them out of the trunk.

And more dreams began to show up in the nice neighborhood of my carefully organised life and I had to clear them off the streets again. And again. But after a few years they stopped appearing and the streets of my life had finally become safe from vagabonds.

The ones in the back kept struggling, and huffing and kicking, but one day they stopped, too. And then, after a while, the trunk began to smell.

The smell crawled into the car and got into my clothes and then into my skin. Wherever I went the smell stalked me, reminding me of what I had done. Working, eating, sleeping, mating and all the other activities to which I had committed myself to had been infected with the insidious aroma of my rotting dreams. Something had to be done.

One day, I drove to a secluded clearing in the middle of the forest. There, I popped open the trunk, cut through the garbage bags and uncovered the rotting corpses. I dragged them out and lined them up on the ground. On closer inspection the dreams did not look that bad. They carried themselves with a certain nobility, even in their death. As I began to throw them one by one in the mass grave I had dug for them, a tidal wave of sorrow began to flood my calculated movements. These dreams had been good people and they deserved better than to rot in the trunk of my car, wrapped in garbage bags of fear, laziness and self-doubt and then be buried in a mass grave. But what was done was done.

I was now ready to throw the last one in. It was the oldest one. The first dream I’ve ever had about being a writer, and although it was covered in blood and rotting flesh from the other ones it felt a bit different to the touch—it was not as stiff as it should have been. And then it opened its eyes.

It was still alive. The very last in line for the burial, the very first I had ever had. It was hurt pretty bad. Then and there something happened inside of me. I felt relief and then I felt hope.

I took the poor dream and set it on the back seat of my car. I drove it home where I washed it of all the dirt and rotten flesh from the other dreams, and I fed it and gave it a place to sleep and I was happy to have saved it; and I took an oath that from then on I would take care of it and set it up for life with the condition that it should never, ever leave me.

And it never did, and it is with me right now. Never again will I call it a loiterer, a vagrant or a troublemaker and I will always defend it. With my life.

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© C.S.Begu, All Rights Reserved
Read one of my short stories – It Shall Be Revealed
Read one of my poems – Dreamer's Alphabet
Follow my Pills of Wisdom series of thought-bites
My intro

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