An awkward silence
—It’s great seeing you are writing in English at last… how did it happen? —asks Nadja.
—Oh, I am just doing my best, you know. Just thought it would be a good idea.
(Awkward silence)
(Sitting at Tavolinos
The Queen’s Walk, Southwark, London
28/12/2024, early evening)
An awkward silence is what happens inside of me every time someone asks me about my writing, Nadja. Don’t know why, but it has been kind of a life-long issue for me. I guess it has to do with my childhood, when I felt how weird it was for the people around me, more interested in earthly matters than in creating fantasies. The walls we build to survive, I reckon. Anyway, here is what I should have said, dear Nadja: I am plunging into the English pond because I made Translation Degree at the Uni; after a couple of years envolved on languages, though, I decided to move on. Let’s say I had more than enough of building evacuations and enlargements of harbors around the world and I got tired of waiting for a literary chance. After a couple of years, as I say, I found myself in the Education field as a Spanish teacher and that’s all the English that I have been able to add to my poor life since then. Except for our little UK raids, like the visit we paid to you last Christmas.
There are, of course, literary reasons. I feel I have reached the end of something and I don’t know how to go beyond. No publishing house, no prospects of anything. Dead end. So, proved that I can’t stop writing (here I should open a huge round bracket in which I would explain to you what writing means to me -but I won’t do that, we both know you don’t have the time and that you should be sleeping by now, after your looooong day, girl), I made my mind about publishing on-line and being brave and confronting my demons in the language I read the most lastly.
Thanks for asking me in that lovely restaurant by the river. I still dream of the views. And I deeply regret not having been able to explain to you how did happen this wonderful adventure of writing in English. I am doing it now and I hope it is not too late.
Love, Enrique.
