I love monologues. All the truly moving scenes I’ve seen in television and film have involved beautiful and powerful monologues; a character has dealt with the problem for so long that the internal containment fails and everything just comes out. In those few moments you feel the pain and the joy of the character more than you thought possible. You can go through a whole movie without sympathizing with a character but at that crucial moment, the truth of the words is too beautiful to ignore.

The only problem with monologues is they need a response. These aren’t soliloquies, said to oneself to illuminate the audience, they are there to let the oblivious subject become aware of what the audience has known all along. Monologues need a result. There needs to be acceptance or rejection, cheers or jeers. There needs to be a musical swell as the maligned lovers jump into each others eyes, or the look of shame on the antagonist’s eyes as the realisation of his wrongdoing comes upon him. An utterly ignored monologue is one of the most awkward events one can experience.

I’ve tried to ignore the silence of your protestations. Every word echoes through my brain and close reading begins to look like a cursory glance as the faults in my phrasing fragment my mind like a supernova of insecurity. What did I say that was so wrong? How could my words leave no mark on you. When was it that you decided that I didn’t matter?

To say the silence hurts is an absurd understatement. My trial of silence is like Kafka’s in its unrelenting unreasonableness. Each non-word cuts into my flesh, and rips the muscles from my bones. My knees weaken out of fear of the ongoing silence, and I know that I can’t let this be. I need you to know this now and every second I wait feels like another second of waiting for your response. I’m not waiting any longer.

I like engineering. I really do. I’ve spent five years training to become one and I rarely find the material uninteresting, despite the progression in difficulty. I love so many aspects of engineering that my career possibilities with it are nearly limitless and yet my whole life I’ve had a subordinate ambition that continually whispers sweet somethings into my ear: writing. I’ve always wanted to be a writer. I never decided if it would be scholarly writing or working in sleazy Hollywood or some other path but I always loved to write. In fact, I used to think I was pretty good in high school. I would come up with great ideas for stories or I’d just start writing and something would show up on the page that made me laugh or sigh or even made my eyes well up. I sit down and try to write now and sometimes something happens; it’s so much rarer now and yet I feel like if I really dedicated my efforts to being a writer I could succeed. Maybe if I hadn’t spent the last five years deriving differential equations of second order systems and convoluting signals using hamming windows my create literary muscles wouldn’t have atrophied.

I still feel like this is a delusion I tell myself, but as I am relentlessly meta, I can’t help but feel like the rational, “safe” part of my brain tricks me into thinking that my writing skills were never really there and my creative half is waiting to explode with ideas and let the words fall onto the page the way they did when I was young. I was passionate back then. Even when I first fell in love with the internet and created my own site I used it to display my writings online. I would post poetry, short stories, and anything else I could imagine. Now after all these years, it seems like my infatuation with the internet, which began as a means to the end of letting the world at large read my works, has become the end and the means.

I’ve had a website since grade ten (around 7 or 8 years go by now) and I’ve had a blog for around 5 or 6 years by now (though I tend to write a blog, become disinterested in the whole venture and then a few months later start up a new one ignoring the old) and as much as I hate it I love it. I’m a pain in my own ass because I write so many blog posts that literally never making it out of draft mode either because I can’t find a good way to succinctly and memorably conclude my points or because halfway through, I lose the rhetoric which let me express my thoughts to that point. Unfinished thoughts that if I really tried I could write. Which brings me back to my original point.

I love to write. As much as I love engineering and technological problem solving, the concept or writing works that will move other people and connect with people on a level a face-recognition program never could is painfully tantalizing. Granted, I’m in the middle of procrastinating while trying to study for a midterm for my ongoing engineering education so that may taint my thoughts at the moment, but I feel like when I finally graduate I have to give it an honest shot at writing. In whatever form and medium I can do so, I need to try.

I haven’t dreamt much recently. I haven’t dreamt at all, to be honest. When it’s already too late to get a good night’s sleep a finally crawl into bed and wonder if it would matter if I woke up the next morning. I wake up, often late for work, seconds later. The hour long dreams that would take place during an inadvertent 20 minute nap have been replaced by a frightening silence. The idea that dreams have some greater meaning doesn’t hold much water with me but that doesn’t mean they don’t have a purpose. Dreams give us something to which we can aspire. They are literally the wildest dreams of our imagination. The things that would be impossible to conceive of in the plain buttoned down world become commonplace and our mind revels in the freedom to imagine.

I never dreamed about the past. In high school, I dreamt of great love, both emotional and physical. When Laura and I were together and happy, I imagined the future. I imagined the fights we’d have and I imagined the nights when we’d gaze into each other’s eyes and drift to sleep smiling. Everything had a saccharine veneer but it was never cloying. Being in a real relationship made me realize not only that the slow motion montages prevalent in romantic comedies were unrealistic, but also that they were undesirable. Those moments would pale in comparison to just sitting around making fun of bad movies together, or laughing at dead baby jokes. It’s absolutely horrific, absolutely despicable, and absolutely endearing.

Whatever it is that we imagine in dreams is random. Sometimes, it’s our last thought of the night twisted by the random impulses surging through our brain as REM sleep drives us further into our subconscious imagination. It can be a fantasy world, with action and adventure. And it can be a canvas on which the problems of the real world are painted. Beyond the fact that some of my most vibrant and original ideas come from that precious dream scape, what’s so depressing about my dreamless summer is what it could mean. To me, dreams have always represented the elusive possibilities of the future. In that undiscovered country of the future, anything could happen. Love could be lost, love could be won. Dreams were always a way for me to see the future as I would like it.

This lack of dreaming is not contentment, it’s resignation.

A while ago, back when I wrote short stories and poetry and the like, I wrote a poem called “Land Now Lost, or an allegory for humanity.” It was a slightly pompous villanelle though I knew it would be pompous the second I decided to write a villanelle. Anyways, somehow it was submitted to a youth poetry site. I have no idea how it got there it just showed up one day when I was googling my name. Even now, searching my name, that site will pop up in the first few pages. I really wish I knew how it got there. Also, I should add that the site never again released a group of poems after the month they published mine; I’m not sure whether that means they couldn’t find anything better or they hit the bottom of the barrel. Probably the latter given the “quality” of the other poems of that month.