Looking for a Protagonist

:A Letter to Protagonist I Once Misplaced

 

Seeing as I've come to a new pit-stop in my writing, I thought I'd share this entry from one of my private notebooks, written on January 20th of last year.

Finding my main protagonist has been a longtime coming. In all the side-treks I had to take on the journey to get where I am now, I often wondered if I would ever get to him. At times it seemed he was reluctant to enter the story; at others, it seemed I was merely reluctant to find him.

January 20, 2019

Something has to change before I find you.

Something is not quite right yet or I'd have found you already. I need to grow as a person and as a writer before I can do you justice; before I can do myself justice by you.

You are my main character, after all. You will be my most real creation. And yet, you will also be the hardest to obtain, the hardest to keep around, the most difficult to make tangible in your paper-existence. You will be a long time coming; a long time in the making.

I created you out of pain, and disappointment, out of addiction, and regret, and I cannot do you wrong.

You could be the most real thing that I will ever write. Perhaps. If not to others, then to me.

Perhaps that is why I write your name in the gentle whisper of a pencil, so easy to erase. Perhaps that is why I read it like a secret, cross it out when I find it on lost pages. I keep you locked within my mind, turning, lingering, still in the unwritten pages, or rather, in a draft left unedited, lost in the version of a story I am no longer working on.

It is only when I write your name I know that you're still there waiting on the edge of a story that is not yet ready for you.

I am getting my story ready for you. Till now, you have been like a ghost, a half-remembered name, written, but unspoken.

I have searched the pages for you, knowing that a word had the power to pull you forth from beyond the fringes of a paper too often unfolded. I could tug at you with my words, pull you out, pull you in. But nothing good ever happens without patience, without time.

Looking for you has been a journey in itself. Finding you again will be a more challenging and exciting journey still.