A sea of words
I learned to read at an early age, and haven't stopped loving it since then.
I'll read anything: books, newspapers, magazines, dust jacket blurbs, shampoo bottle labels, passing signs from a moving taxi, T-shirt tags, receipts, warning stickers on appliances, flyers, posters, graffiti, tattoos, nutritional information panels and ingredient lists, electronic device manuals and warranty cards, programming language or API documentation, help articles, blog posts, tweets, search results, menus and printed paper placemats at cheap restaurants, handwritten notes, even the usually awkward marketing copy on the back of a bag of chips.
I get a weird sense of vertigo when I realize that somebody wrote all these words that I see around me. Behind each piece of writing is a person, or even a group of people, with their own unique takes on and experiences of the world, circumstances and needs and wants and dreams, traumas and flaws and shortcomings. We are overlapping worlds with our selves at the center, reaching with various tendrils towards each other. Reality is infinitely detailed, zoomable, comprising rabbit-holes and connections that branch out but also loop back around and link back together.
I would like my own writing to be an outgrowth of, contribution to, and a celebration of this complexity, this beautiful irreducible chaos. Sure, I'll always be just one fish in this vast swirling sea, but I can only keep swimming, leaving my own trails and traces, grasping ever towards beauty, truth, or at least as close an approximation of such as I can hope for.
This essay is part of a month-long series of 30 essays.