Rhythm. Writing. And the blues.

I started talking really early. I went at a rapid pace from learning new words to building full sentences. By the time I was one-ish, I was speaking in capital letters, commas and italics. Then came the big full stop. I shut up. Completely.

I spent my entire childhood in silence. Silence that poured out of my ears like thick black goo and swallowed me whole. Silence that amputated my limbs and cut out any chances of a social life. Silence that did a massive memory-dump of everything I don’t remember doing between 2 and 20. I thought words were something I would never get along with. Until I chanced upon writing.

That’s when words became my best friends. They gave me a job and defined my career. They gave me a voice and lent me a ear. They coloured my thoughts, exemplified my experiences and made life more meaningful. They proffered a pun to play with, an idiom to iterate and an analogy to allude to alliteratively. They stood by me through fat and thin. They gave me strength to silence the world. Until I opened my mouth again.

I started talking, that too with great difficulty, to get a business going. Polite conversations with new clients. Banal banters with associates. Aggressive negotiations with suppliers. Academic deliberations with colleagues. Moronic debates with old clients. Blah blah blah. There were so many yakkity-yaks jumping the fence in my sleep that I neither had the time, nor the mindspace to write. So, when I decided to restructure my business to focus mainly on writing, the prospects looked frighteningly foreboding.

Perhaps I am not so big with multitasking. Perhaps speaking and writing couldn’t co-exist in my life, like two grumpy grandmas living together. Perhaps I needed all of 30 years to fine-tune both skills, before I could begin to process them simultaneously. But now that I have finally understood their mutual exclusivity, I intend to start chipping away at my future, letter by letter.

So here I am, on the threshold of new beginnings and old age, solemnly vowing that I will start scribbling again. And that’s something I can give you in writing.