I read somewhere—or perhaps I heard it in a conversation—that in ancient times, the Greeks and Romans believed that creativity—that ability to create something new: paintings, plays, sculptures, music, scientific concepts, or whatever it might be—did not stem from within the individual, but from small divine beings that lived within the walls of their studios and, for unknown reasons and at unpredictable moments, would use them to express whatever they wanted. The Romans called them geniuses, and the Greeks, daemons.

When I heard the story, I couldn’t help but smile at the possibility.

Until recently…

I must say, I’ve been a seasonal writer. To make it sound a bit more elegant, I could declare myself a season writer. I mean that every so often, and for a fairly limited time, I would set out to write, spending 2 or 3 nights drafting short stories, opinion pieces, or simply translating from the high language of the wise to the mundane language of my own, concepts and theories from the most varied disciplines.

Some of them I uploaded to my website; others I stored on an external drive (so they wouldn’t get lost), but inevitably, whether because I changed my site or lost the flash drive, the vast majority of them were lost.

I think many of those writings—based on the benevolent judgment of some acquaintances—were quite decent. I think, after all, that I’m not bad at it. If I truly had a genius, he was rather lazy but skilled and—let’s be honest—a bit cynical.

But I wasn’t always like this. Before, I wrote about everything and for any reason. My backpack was never without a notebook and a pen or, at the very least, a chewed-up pencil and an old business card in my wallet.

Those days, I was sure, were behind me, like so many other useless hobbies of my adolescence.

Until recently…

I was going through a tough and rather painful time in my life, and for a while, a story from my youth had been lingering in my mind. It was a tender, sweet, and ultimately tragic love story—like any self-respecting love story should be. It was a real story that, in a moment of trance, I had written, as I did back then, at the first café I came across, on various types of paper: napkins, donated notebook sheets, or even the margins of a gifted newspaper.

It was a story written but never published. Today, I’m sure that if I sift through the several kilos of paper I have stored away, I’ll find the originals of that story.

But I didn’t have them on hand, and I hadn’t thought about writing it.

At that time, I would wander, sometimes from one corner of the house to the other, and at other times, from one end of the street to the other, murmuring to myself about the cruel fate that confronted me.

One day, while I was carefully measuring the steps between one end of a nearby park and the other, a neighbor, perhaps driven by the need to know whether my purpose was to wear down the soles of my shoes or to create a groove in the sidewalk, dared to ask me:

—Are you okay?

—Yes —I replied, like a grumpy automaton.

And suddenly, seeing the astonishment on his face, I stopped. I felt an irresistible urge to write. Write what? Anything? No, it was that story, desperately trying to escape my heart, finding no other path but through my head.

I patted my shirt pocket, searching for a pen, opened my wallet hoping to find an old receipt or any business card to write my ideas on. Nothing. It had been years since I carried those tools with me. Urged on by the silent screams in my head, I looked at my neighbor:

—A pen —I almost shouted—. Paper! Urgently!

He must have been a bit frightened because it took him a moment to respond:

—Nnn… nnno, I don’t have anything my friend. What I need to jot down, I do on my phone.

I cursed all the gods of technology. The idea of writing something like that on a phone terrified me. There was no way of knowing how long the story would be, and my thumbs had explicitly declared themselves useless for such tasks.

Desperate, I pulled out my phone, opened the first text editor I found, and began…

As the story progressed, I felt it wasn’t me, that I was merely an instrument. My tireless thumbs tapped the screen almost flawlessly; the words wrote themselves, the periods and commas knew their places, and obediently, they rushed to where they belonged.

It was as if that genius had finally taken pity on me, as if years and years of unfulfilled desires, frustrations, joys, dreams, and bottled-up sorrows had finally found a way to escape.

But it wasn’t a small, cursing genius as I had imagined mine would be, if I had one; it was a feminine presence, sweet, grand, but relentless.

—Write —she whispered to me—, write, let them know, they must know, they must understand, write, don’t stop…

1 page, 2 pages, my neighbor watched me and couldn’t believe it. Still a bit scared, he asked:

—Are you sure you’re okay?

As if in a dream, I heard myself replying:

—Yes, sure. It’s a report they’re urgently waiting for at the office.

I kept going—more words, 3 pages, more paragraphs, and now, now it’s done. Let’s see, how do I end it? Period?

Impossible. These stories, the true ones, the ones from the soul, don’t end, not even when they end. People may change, but the stories don’t…

—Well done —I heard, or rather, I felt—. Well done, now publish it.

—But I haven’t finished it yet —I said—. I haven’t put the final period.

—Better —said the voice—, better, just publish it.

And even today, as I write these memories, I don’t know how the story will end. I hope it doesn’t, which is why I still resist putting a final period…