Derek Johnson Muses

When I first graduated college seven years ago, I never wanted to do anything. I played a lot of video games, baked cookies and cooked dinner, watched shows and DVD’s over and over again.Three and a half years ago, I still didn’t want to do anything, other than the work my dad told me to do. I knowingly lived the lie; I pretended to be busy to people’s faces. But the truth of the matter was, I didn’t want to go out.

Then, as the winter of 2009 turned to spring, I found something. Or rather, something found me as a situation came together. I had just purchased my first iPod and had music at the ready to write to; it wouldn’t have happened without the music to fall into. Then there was a conflict that I came into, between me and a TV show I was watching. The story that came across the screen was one that I hadn’t held to be true in my heart. Thus, I put in my headphones, sat with my computer on my lap, and pounded the keyboard, putting the story in my heart into my computer for the day when I couldn’t recognize it from the story on the screen.

That day came sooner than I expected, and when it happened, I was hit with more bricks than I ever thought I could be. Even to this day, I can’t admit everything that happened to me that night.

It’s been over three years since that incident, and the story I’ve written remains in the drawer. It was a story that was written with the idealized passion of a young man who hid from conflict on the page, only wanting to prove the sincerity of his desire. Like a lot of single people, I wrote a relationship that was mostly infatuation and free of the conflict that normal relationships face. Perhaps this is why I don’t return to the story, because I have written it to be this great perfect world, and by opening it up, I will subjugate myself to changing that world in my head.

At the time I was writing that manuscript, I thought it would be the beginning of a writing career where I would write a novel every year or every other year, something like that. I didn’t care what I made, just as long as it paid bills that had to be paid. But afterward, I just kept rewriting the first half of the book for a year or so, never really getting anywhere. Eventually, I quit working on it, and moved on. Part of me is starting to regret that, if only because that was something I cared about passionately, and I rarely have passion.

I’m starting to write down ideas for that work again. I don’t know if it will get anywhere, but I know I love that project.