Who Wrote This? (Spoiler: Apparently Me.)

Photo by Ali Bakhtiari on Unsplash

I’m not a pack rat. At least, not in the way people usually mean it. But the first memory I have of being interested in collecting anything goes back to when I was around eight or nine, and I first learned about stamp collecting—philately. I was fascinated by the idea that these tiny pieces of paper had traveled through towns, across states, over oceans. They were carried by people, planes, and ships, and each one arrived with a little bit of another place attached to it. Through stamps, I felt like I could glimpse other cultures and countries in a way books hadn’t yet offered me.

For many years, I was a proper philatelist. If I heard that someone—usually one of my parents’ friends—was receiving letters from abroad, I’d politely ask if I could have the stamps. Then, before they could try to “help,” I quickly added that I needed to be the one to remove them so they wouldn’t tear them by hand and destroy their value. Over time, I collected thousands of stamps from nearly a hundred countries.

I collected other things too—coins, paper money, comic books. Hundreds of comic books, in fact. But my family moved constantly, rarely staying more than two years in any house. And when we made the ultimate move to the United States, all those collections became a burden. I had to part with most of it. I remember giving my closest friends many of the things I loved most—vinyl records, books—because I didn’t want them to end up in a landfill. The rest was sold off for pocket change.

When we arrived in the US, I was still a teenager, and the first year and a half was brutal. I spent most days moping around, grieving the fact that my entire life and social world had been erased in the span of an eight-hour flight. I would imagine what my friends back home were doing at any given hour and map my American schedule against theirs. It was my way of staying connected to a life I’d lost.

To cope, I wrote letters. For a while, I wrote four or five longhand letters every single day and mailed them religiously. A letter took two weeks to arrive; if my friends responded immediately—which they rarely did—it would take another two weeks to hear back. A full month for a single reply. I still did it. I needed that connection.

And it turns out I saved nearly all of that correspondence.

I also wrote a lot during that time—notes, memories, fragments of stories, maybe partly to keep my past alive, and maybe partly because even then, without understanding it, I already dreamed of writing a book about my life.

The other day, while looking for something completely different, I came across a binder I hadn’t opened in at least a year and a half. It contained many of those early writings from 1991. And then something funny happened—one of those strange moments where you see something, think it’s surprisingly good, and wonder, Who made this? Only to realize it was you.

In that binder was a handwritten short story from September 2020—five pages, written in pen, a little sci-fi piece I didn’t even remember writing. I started reading it cold, not recognizing it at all, and halfway down the first page I caught myself thinking, I hope I wrote this because this is actually pretty good. And sure enough, it was mine. There were only a few scratched-out words, barely any editing. And I was genuinely impressed.

Now, I know I’m no John Steinbeck. I’m still figuring out my writing voice. But this has happened to me before—I’ll read a chapter here or there from one of the two books I’ve published and be surprised by how well something came out. How I managed to capture a feeling or a thought just the way I’d meant to.

Not everything I write is like that, of course. I wish it were. But every now and then I stumble onto a passage and think, Hey, maybe there’s something here.

This short story feels like one of those moments. I haven’t read all of it yet—only the first page and a half—but I’m planning to sit down this weekend and type it up to see where it leads. It’s sci-fi, a genre I haven’t really explored before, but it looks promising.

I suppose that’s part of being a writer—getting the thoughts out of your head and onto paper. I can at least check that box. The next step is publishing. Maybe that’s the part I need to start focusing on more… because isn’t that what being a writer is all about?