The elusive story

I find myself in the dark trying to recall those glittering elusive things, words that dart around in my head like shoals of fish. Curious but frightened, and every time I seek to examine them they dart out of my reach, elusive shadows in a dark sea. They are like stories I have half heard or conversations unfinished. These words, thoughts, conversations escape my futile attempt to put them to paper and record them. Memories of a distant past, and unexplained adventures all swarm me wanting to be put on paper, but whenever I discover the courage to delve into these undiscovered depths the stories and words vanish as an overused well dries up in the summer heat. From the time I was little, the blank page scared me. My desire to fill that sheet overwhelmed me at some points in my childhood, but what was written was ineffectual garbage. Nothing of my deep fears and desires came into the writing, making it dead and lifeless on the white page as the dust on the wind. Nothing of the spark that I harbored deep next to my heart appeared. It seemed I would never get to share the vast vistas of my imagination with anybody but myself. That thought alone spurred the restless dreams within me to rise above the mundane ramblings of my life. It was this fear that spurred the pen to paper; it was the hope that I could capture some small part of that spark and share with others that keeps me writing.