Makeshift Oxygen

"Why do you write?" someone once asked me.

"To leave my mark," I shrugged, "Maybe to create something that will outlive me?"

"Stop it. Writing won't ever make you money," another quipped.

"I don't need it to. I can make money doing something else," I smiled.

Twenty years later and I'm still writing, and not a single one of my works has been published. It was wishful thinking but I did try. I had been hopeful and childish. I don't know how long it has been since I've even submitted a draft. Maybe it lays forgotten with some stack of paper in a corner of a desolate room.

I go home after a long day of driving a crowded bus around the city. Pushing open the tattered curtains of a door, I enter my tin-shed abode. There isn't much to steal in here, a mattress, two 5 litre drums of water and a repaired wooden desk and chair. On top of it is a stack of newsprint paper and some cheap ballpoint pens. Looking at those remind me that I had saved up some money to buy paper today, which I forgot to do.

I freshen up, take a seat and decide to sort my drafts since I have nothing better to do.

These pages tell many stories, stories of Faisal's adventures, stories of how Mitu and Kobir fell in love and made it work despite all the hardship, stories of faraway kings and queens, princes and princesses.

And lastly, they tell stories of my own experiences.

I tenderly sort through them. Not a single page has any wrinkles.

Touching each page of a story, reading some lines from it pulls me into their world. I am the invisible audience to their day to day lives. The worlds I write are so much better than the one I live in. So much so, that I want to live in them instead.

I pause. A question from a lost time rings in my head.

"Why do you write?"

"Why do I write?" I wondered, my mind already formulating answers.

I write to express myself, to explore new worlds, to set myself free.

Because it's all I know how to do.

I write to leave my mark. To create something that will outlive me.

"I write to live," I said to no one in particular.

The writer is a class 10 student at Monipur High School and College.