Passio

For years I kept a desk the way other men keep a shrine.

I sat at it in the mornings before the city woke. I waited for the work to feel large enough to deserve me. I rewrote one sentence until it lay flat and grave on the page, then rewrote it again, and most mornings I left with nothing and carried the nothing around like proof of seriousness. Across one of those years I finished four pages. I had good reasons for the four pages. I guarded the reasons better than I ever guarded the work.

The word gave me permission. Passion comes from the Latin passio, suffering, from pati, to endure. The early Christians used it for the long bad afternoon on the cross. Somewhere across the centuries it softened into a word we say over wine, a word for people and football clubs and the work we throw ourselves into. I went back to the root and took the root as law. If the writing cost me, it counted. If it hurt, I had gone deep enough. Suffering paid the toll, and past the toll waited the prize, a seat in some marble room where the great dead writers keep their chairs.

Here is what the bill came to. The years I treated the desk like a shrine were the years I wrote almost nothing. Reverence makes a good hiding place. While I waited for the work to turn holy, I never risked writing something stupid, and a serious man, I had decided, could not afford stupid. Whole seasons went by where the only thing I finished was the case for why I could not finish anything.

The truth showed up in the exceptions. Every so often a story got away from me. I would start something with no weight to it, an army of eighty thousand who panic in the dark and slaughter each other while the enemy never arrives, an astronaut who answers a knock on the airlock and finds himself already standing inside, and I would chase it down just to find out what happened next. Those mornings ran fast. I laughed alone at my own desk. The pages came in a rush and I forgot to check whether any of it was deep. I filed those stories away and kept quiet about how easy they had been, how much fun. Fun looked too cheap to matter. I had the whole thing backwards, and it took me half a life to turn it around.

It turned around a few months ago. I cannot point to the morning. I sat down to write something ridiculous on purpose, with no plan to show it to anyone, and the hours went somewhere I could not account for. My coffee went cold at my elbow. My back ached, and I noticed the ache only when I stood.The story did things I had not ordered it to do, and I went where it dragged me, the leash sawing my palm raw. When I read it back, it was alive, because I had been alive while making it. That was the whole secret.

The root of the word holds. Passion still means to suffer, and I do suffer over sentences, the way you sweat on a good run, the way your lungs burn on a climb worth climbing. The pain is just weather I move through to reach the part where the story tells me what happens next. If it does not bring me alive, it does not count. That is my law now, and it fits better than the one it replaced.

I have lived enough to name what I am comparing this to. I have fallen in and out of love with women who dried my mouth to chalk before they ever got a word out. I have made small fortunes and watched them go and made them again. Climbers keep a scale for fun. Type one stays fun while it happens, a warm afternoon, a fast way down. Type two hurts the whole way and turns sweet only in the retelling. Type three brings no fun at any point and survives as a story you tell to prove you came back. I have collected all three. I have the scars and the bank statements and the stories to show for them.

None of it comes close to a morning spent writing an idiot story bound for the trash. That is the most alive I have ever been. I went looking for a marble room full of dead men's chairs, and the thing I had been chasing sat at my own desk the whole time, free and a little stupid. I am done hiding it.

Passion means to suffer. It also means this. I will take this.