Words

     Much like the words get lost in the melody of a song, thoughts can get lost in their intangibility. Thoughts are literally electrical messages buzzing along the neurons of our brains, and oftentimes they don't make sense until they are made tangible by saying them aloud or writing them down. I can't tell you how many times I've written paragraphs in Microsoft Word in order to sort out a situation. Nine times out of ten I re-read what I've furiously typed out and come to the conclusion that what I was thinking doesn't make sense at all.
     I write mostly because I just enjoy the act of putting thoughts to a page, whether eloquent or brash. There's something about the articulation of a thought into words that make the thought more understandable. Somehow, words in the brain are different than words on paper (or a computer screen). Most of my writing isn't, and doesn't intend to be, well said. The more I write, the more I realize that I have an unfortunate love affair with run-on sentences, outlandish metaphors, and strange similes. But that's why it's fun to me. I'm generally not a creative person, but writing gives me an arena in which I define the meaning of the word "creative".
    I wrote countless essays in high school, most of which were four paragraphs of spoon-feeding my English teachers with symbolism, metaphors, and elegantly dressed sentences disguised as profound thought. I was pretty good at that kind of writing, and, albeit stressful, I enjoyed it in a strange way. Nothing was more exciting than getting an essay prompt that wasn't dreadfully annoying. That kind of writing was structured, rigid, and just plain unnecessary. I'm a firm believer that writing is up for interpretation by the reader, and the reader only; but I found myself writing pages upon pages about how an author foreshadowed certain events, used mundane objects as symbols, and making connections between characters. But whose to say I'm right or wrong? Who made up these extensive lists of what an author meant to convey when they wrote a given piece years ago? I could gripe about the multiple choice questions we had to answer, but I think that would become berating and boring for even me to read. Luckily, writing a blog has no structure or rules. Sure, it's called "On the Run", but here I am, writing about writing and not running. How empowering.
     As long as I have thoughts, I will write. As long as I write, I will make up crazy metaphors and similes, and I will be impressed in how little sense they actually make. But they help me make sense of everything else.