The sanctuary where silence becomes a mirror, writing turns into surrender, and words find exactly what we try to evade in life.
By Lidia Roselló
HoyLunes – The Orange Room is not an office. It is not a pretty desk. Nor is it that corner of the house you show in your ´stories´ when you resolve to “be consistent”. The Orange Room is something else: a place you enter when you finally sit down to write and discover that the story was already there before you, waiting for you patiently.
January has its own way of making everything more evident. The light enters at a sharper angle, as if it arrived weary. The air smells of fresh laundry and new promises. Outside, life moves forward with its noise—messages, errands, lists, notifications—but inside, when you close the door and sit before the blank page, something happens that cannot be faked: silence ceases to be silence and becomes a mirror.
I finally sit down. And no, it is not a productivity phrase. It is not “I am finally disciplined.” It is something else. It is “I am finally stopping the run.” It is “I am finally staying here”. Because sitting down to write has little to do with heroism and everything to do with surrender. You sit down and, without realizing it, you begin to negotiate with yourself: today I will write something light, today I will not open what hurts, today I will not stir things up too much because I do not have the strength…
The story does not come to entertain you; rather, it comes to ask you to observe.
And it does so without raising its voice, without threats, like someone who opens a window and lets the cold air in so that you can no longer keep saying you are fine when you are not.
Sometimes we believe we write to understand a character, a scene, an ending. And we do, but we also write to give shape to things we do not yet know how to name. To give them light or at least an outline. It is curious: you can spend weeks avoiding yourself in life, but as soon as you sit down to write, that which you were elegantly dodging suddenly appears.
Guilt has a subtle way of slipping into the text. It does not enter saying “hello, I am guilt”; it enters as an erasure. In that sentence you write with conviction and then, without knowing why, you delete. In that adjective that seemed perfect and suddenly makes you feel ashamed. In that scene you do not want to tell because, if you tell it, you give yourself away. Guilt is not always a giant remorse; sometimes it is just a micro-gesture: the hand that freezes on the keyboard, the breath that catches, the need to justify something you have not yet written, or the need to go drink a glass of water.
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