Just scribble really

I have lost the words, the muse, the inspiration. In fact, I believe I have lost everything of true value and importance in my life. They used to come to me, day and night, words flowing from my tongue, cascading onto the paper to form tales of unimaginable splendour. Now I am an empty slate and the words do not come. Sometimes I lie awake at night in the still and the quiet and try to rediscover the words I have lost.
 
Some of them are ordinary, everyday words, the type you blithely disregard until they are gone.
Telephone. Dictionary. Fridge.
How crippled my life seems to be in their absence; yet it is not the loss of these that hurts me most. Ethereal, descriptive words too have fled into the dark. I would mourn their absence, one by one, but I cannot remember their names. My mother told me once, as a child, that names are the wellspring of meaning. To name an object, a feeling, a concept is to reveal a truth. I imagined a huge tome, blackened with age, filled with all of these names, holding within its covers the sum of human knowledge. It incensed me as a child when new names were bandied about, introduced with no thought, no reverence. Now I am merely grateful for those names I can still remember.

I have taken to writing down the names I do not wish to forget. The names of those close to me, words I love, words I feel are important. My house is filled with paper mountains, notes everywhere, random words buzzing like static in my head. I read them sometimes, rolling the words around on my tongue to feel how they taste. It is an eternal voyage of rediscovery as I forget and learn again and then forget. My neighbours watch me from behind twitching curtains. They think I do not know, that I cannot see them, that I have somehow lost my wits. They do not understand. They do not face the constant fear of oblivion, of retreat into the silent dark, the nameless void.
 
I tell myself that my mind is a blank sheet of paper that I may write on at will. I have the power to choose what I write, what I keep and what I consign to the dark. Yet amongst that, I do not have power over what I forget and so I scribble the words onto pieces of paper and scatter them so that they will be there when I need them. In the clarity of the night I see myself as others see me; mumbling to myself, leaving notes, lights on in the small hours of the night. I find that I do not care what they think. I have to continue to safeguard what I have. I am too young to lose my mind. I must therefore assume that one day the words will return. I must be ready for that day so that I may use them wisely.