"Why I Write" by Leilani Chavez

I was seventeen when I had my first taste of belated rebellion. There I was, Capri in hand, hiding in a videoke room along Estrada with three friends. The smoke whirled around us, leaving a pungent smell of combusted tobacco in uniforms we would later sprinkle with talcum powder. I was busy practicing the deed when one of my companions asked: Why do you smoke?

What I said then, I would repeat eight years after, when that same friend asked a more personal question: Why do you write? The scenario was, however, different. No hidings, no uniforms, no smoky secrets. We were huddled in a corner table at a coffee shop in Greenbelt when she dropped the question. I, feigning composure, pulled out a white stick, fingered the familiar fine gold lines, flicked light, and after a breath or two of nicotine, answered with cinematic confidence: “Because I can.”

I have long quit smoking. I still write.

Looking back, I was never truthful; I didn’t know why I write. I just do it. I have been writing for as long as I can recall; I don’t remember not knowing how to write. Yet for the two decades that I have been with the craft, I never sat down to ponder why or how I do it. It was imbued in me, the way babies know Mommy and Daddy or a group of sparrows glide in sync across the purple fingers of twilight. It was not a question of like or love or passion, it was out of habit—sheer familiarity.

If I delve deeper, I would always remember an instance when I was around six. My grandmother was braiding my hair for school and having no better thing to do, I watched her from the vanity mirror. Amidst the wizened forehead, freckles, and the noticeable jowl, her eyelashes fluttered like dragonfly wings, shading hazel eyes that would brighten as light hit them. She was the most beautiful woman in the world.

When she was done, we would wait by the front porch and languidly stare at my neighbours. Kim’s Dad was wearing his usual crisp green shirt, the Contreras’s red beetle zoomed past, and my friend mouthed ‘See you in class’ by the window. And as the world breathed around me, I wondered: Why do I see the sun and not the sweat on my forehead? Why do I hear the lawnmover and inhale the sharp aroma of freshly cut grass? Do people see me the way I see them—a mass of hair, eyes, ears, and flesh? Do they read my mind? Why do I feel and why do I care? These questions played in my head until the school bus arrived and steered my thoughts to class assignments and Polly Pockets and Pippi Longstockings.

When I got home, I wrote down those insights in a journal, waiting for answers. Sometimes I get it, sometimes I don’t. And it has continued until my grandmother stopped braiding my hair, until we moved to a different house, until I grew out of dolls. This tug-of-war between me and my writing has become my undisturbed world. Sometimes repulsed, sometimes enthralled, my writing and I have shared a love-hate relationship through the years. And it went on until I met Edward Hopper.

Edward and I are both painters. I use words, he used acrylic. We both love the movies. The desire for nothing—for what is absent from the senses—filled his works and completed the missing puzzle of my writing. Or at least justified why I grew enamored of the unexplained things. And if my friend were to ask me again why I write, I would say:

I write to show what’s there—and ironically, what isn’t there. I write to bridge my two worlds: the one I can sense and the one that dances in existential fragments. My writing is a confluence of the tangible and the impalpable, a bridge, a reminder that I exist and my thoughts are real. I write to reify silences, feelings, and weird passions that swirl like cigarette smoke, shrouded by sensual desires.

I write to make meanings, to make meanings matter.