This is a story about a woman who's had an intense passion for words. All she ever did was make stories and worked hard for it to be put on paper.
This is a story about Inka. The girl who either had a book or a pen.
This is also a story of how she died. How lonely she was at her deathbed. Alone because she didn't have anyone to be with her.

This is a story for you as well, reader. You'll know in the end.

•••

With the brief words given, Inka might sound like one of the most influential persons among aspiring writers, but she never became one.

She was a bad writer.

If one asks a writer what his or her life is like, he or she might say that they spend their whole life trying to put their feelings or experiences into words, and try to become better at it everyday or with every single publication, so they can make a living with it.
One can achieve this goal, if they're lucky enough.

Inka didn't have luck. But besides that, she also unfortunately lacked the talent.

I'm Elna, and I'm a journalist. I grew interested about Inka because I thought her life would make an interesting story. All she knew was write, but no one read a single of her work.
The ones that did however, told everyone else that she wasn't any good.
That's what I'm about to find out.

I'm going to find what's left of Inka's stories, maybe try and make something off it. Because as a writer myself, I can't help but empathize with the pain she must have felt while she was still alive. All the rejection and the rumors thrown at her for doing what she only knew how and loved.

For years, Inka was living off with nothing. She was practically begging her neighbors some food, and other than being an outcast in a tight little community far away, she was a nobody.
How did I come to know of her story?
Well that's my own story to tell in a different time.

•••
This is what I've come to know from the local officials. Inka was left at a doorstep when she was just a baby. Apparently she was an unwanted child, and the family that took her in, didn't seem to like her at all as well. She grew up to be a helper around the house, doing basic chores. She wasn't given any education, because the family that took her in was poor, and with the husband and wife's five children, they couldn't afford to send Inka the privilege.
So Inka spent most of her childhood ignorant to the basic education. She couldn't read, and only learned to talk by copying the conversations she heard around her.
It wasn't until she was ten years old that she could fully understand sentences and comprehend what they meant.
Her passion for writing came to her in a surprising event.
She found a stowed away book, that was a classic literature from one of the owner's children. It was old, and the pages started coming off, but she took it and learned it for herself.
She read them, but she couldn't understand what it meant. She understood little, but that didn't really do justice to the story.
It was then and there that Inka copied the exact book to used pages from newspapers and old notebooks. She looked for blank pages out of these materials, and taught herself to write. While every kid her age was playing outside, or learning how to talk to boys, she was inside, scribbling away.

It took a year for her to fully understand what the book was about, and when she learned, she started to write her own stories.
Of course it wasn't any good. Some of the words were missing letters and sentences didn't connect, so it was hard for anyone to understand without doing extra effort.
She pursued anyway, because it was her escape to the reality she was in.
At thirteen years old, tragedy struck upon the family that sheltered her. The father died, and without a father, the family collapsed. The wife's sons and children were taken by other relatives, some went far away to work, and for years none of them came back, until only the woman and Inka was left in the house.
The woman died of old age, and Inka was left alone since.

Inka never knew what the world meant to her, never discovered love either, because rumors circulated that Inka was a curse to the family that ruined them entirely.
She didn't mind any of this of course, and then people started to speculate that she was a lunatic.
No one came near her, or talked to her to wish her well. She remained put where she was, unable to realize the things she could do. Of course no one from the little community would offer her a chance because now she was treated like an outcast.
Writing was her only escape.

One concerned older woman visited her once to give her something to eat every now and then. She found Inka's stories and read some of her works, but in the end she bad-mouthed Inka to the rest of the people that she was bad at her stories, and has gone completely insane.
People started to mock Inka for it, although Inka never understood why. She could never fathom the hate that was given to her, but the good thing was she never cared.

Writing was what she did before falling ill at the age of 57, and finally succumbing to it months later before she was to turn 58.

•••

I knocked on the woman's house who gave Inka food while she was still alive. She was kind and hospitable to me, although that was customary. Good for me, she actually kept a box of Inka's things, which I sorted through and found what I wanted. Her stories.

I'm not going to lie. She was indeed a bad writer, but what she wrote about was her life, and that for me is good.

I read how much she wanted a family of her own, but didn't know how. How much she wanted to go to school like everyone else.
She wrote stories of her daily life, much like a diary. She wrote about her days, and everything pretty much were the same. That she woke up and took a bath, and dressed up, only to take care of the woman who took her in before she died.
Of course I had difficulty reading them. I needed to edit it and make it understandable.

•••

I spent months working on my story about Inka, the Bad Writer.

I actually thought a lot of people would read it, but then when it came out, only a few people did, which saddened me because I worked so hard for it, and felt that I didn't do Inka justice.
People told me Inka was no special person, and that I should dump everything and just get a new story to cover, but I couldn't help feeling otherwise.
Inka was indeed a special person.
Not everybody can just see it.

That was the lesson I learned about her.

We are all special, and maybe we are all bad writers , who only want to write about something good, but it doesn't require for us that the whole world should be able to read it.
As writers we are dead the moment we let our stories out. It is up to the readers to comprehend our stories. As writers we have no control of the reader's understanding then. They may love it or hate it, that is not in our control.
We must teach ourselves never to be defined by the number of people who read our work, althought many is good, it doesn't mean that if it's less, we should stop writing.

The numbers don't matter at all.
Even if it's just one person.
That's all it takes.
Even if that person is you alone either. You know what they say, believe and somebody else will.

I wrote about a woman I believed was special, and even though no one else saw her that way, what matters is someone did.

And that someone is me.

So if someone believes you are special, by your family, friend, or lover, believe it.

For everyone is special, even if not everyone sees it.



© IllegnaTheScribbler