chriskingwong:

Thinking back, my handwriting hasn’t changed since I was 10 years old. I don’t have money, talent, or friends, but I’ve got this little chicken-scratch scrawl that made all of my elementary teachers cringe and my classmates laugh. My homework was a mess of dots, lines, and curves that I somehow managed to convince everyone wasn’t a joke, and I’ve always waited for the day that someone would tear up my papers in frustration, cursing the public school system for the mistake it had made of me. It never came.

But one day I saw the cutest girl and I had to see her again. So I scribbled my name and number on a torn-off, wrinkled corner of a flyer that I still had in my back pocket, handed it to her as nervous as a little schoolgirl circling the “Yes” on a middle school love note, and set my AT&T default ring-tone to full volume and vibration. It never rang. It sang as beautifully as silence does when unprovoked and it wasn’t until months later that I ran into her again and I asked her why. She said she didn’t realize that phones had buttons on them with quite the same pictures I had drawn for her. That no matter how hard she tried to reach me, 17AX8Q3 just wasn’t in the phonebook, and if there were only 3 Chris’s in the entire city, she would’ve tracked down every, single, one of them, just hoping to see my face. She couldn’t do it. And so I missed out on what may have been, or may not have been, or almost was, or almost wasn’t, the best, or worst, 1, 2, 10, 100, million days of my life with a woman I guess I’ll never know. But that’s fine, because writing’s never been my thing anyway.

And thinking back, I never knew how those little squiggles they call words could tell a story. I’ve never held anyone’s attention with a pen because your ears care more about what I have to say than your eyes do about what I write. I etch thoughts into more than just paper when I speak and I’ve got ten times too many worries to care that my handwriting is the ugly sibling in the family portrait who wishes he could be photogenic like his sister Calligraphy.

But on computer screens glowing bright white, my words are as beautiful as photoshopped models, dancing to an electronic pulse, swaying to the rhythm of a flashing vertical cursor, begging me to sit down and feed her my hopes and my dreams. My nightmares. She tells me to stop thinking, put my hands all over her, and push all the right buttons, so I do. I type further, and faster, and further, and faster, until my fumbling fingers can’t fly quick enough to satisfy her so I yell, screaming out the furies of my past and present, praying for the relief of the future. I don’t have money, talent, or friends but I don’t give a fuck because all she wants is my soul. So I give it to her. And now she has it.

She’s got my heart and my mind and with both trembling hands I whisper out my biggest secret: I’m lonely. And she listens. And I stand back for a moment, and then I brush my finger to the top of the page and hit delete. Maybe one day I’ll have the courage to open up to more than just empty shadows. And maybe one day I’ll find the beauty in the light, but for now all I know is one thing: I’ll never be good at writing.

          -chriskingwong

Beautiful.