the day I became a writer

a tree filled with invisible singing birds

Me with my camera, image by Annie Marston

I became a writer on the Pindamri Road, a quiet, straight thoroughfare that leads from the town of Kamphaeng Phet out to a secondary school, and beyond it the temples of the historical park. I was eighteen years old, having recently left home, clutching a blank red A4 notebook and pen as I boarded the plane. I had arrived in Thailand to live and work for a year in the school beside the ruined temple.

It was the end of the day and I was on my way to the market for noodles. As I cycled down the long road, the air hung heavy and dream-like, softening the edges of everything. The wheels of my purple bicycle spun in the quiet. Two school students on a motorbike zipped by me with a cry of ‘helloooooo!’ and then silence closed back around me, golden and sticky like honey.

At the night market, bright electric lights sliced through the soft air. Insects swarmed the floodlights, jostling for space in their tantalising glow. I joined the people who also buzzed around the lights, shopping for food and catching up with neighbours — it was an evening like any other. On the corner, the khanom seller smiled at me from behind her stall, a glass counter stacked with banana, coconut, and egg custard sweets.

Supper in my bicycle basket, I made my way back to the shared house in the grounds of the school. At the crossroads, I passed two tall banyan trees. From within their dense canopy of leaves, the sound of song spiralled out into the evening air — I could not see them, but the trees were filled with tiny birds. I felt their carolling as a vibration through my limbs, a full, unseen, mysterious joy that consumed me until the trees vanished behind me and I was swallowed up again by heat-humming silence.

Whilst I can still recall the scent of sweet banana, the buzz of insects and the viscose quality of the light, what is clearest in my memory is not the evening itself but the experience of writing about it. I cycled as fast as I could, hurrying back to the hot little bedroom I shared with my friend Annie, where I sat on the wooden floor, back against my silky turquoise bedspread and scribbled furiously in my notebook. I remember feeling deeply the poetry of the birds, knowing that I wanted to record this experience, to capture it, to tell my own story.

I did not know it until many years later, but looking back, I see that moment — bicycle wheels whizzing along an empty road as I passed a tree filled with invisible singing birds — as the moment I became a writer. It pinpoints the instant I fell in love with the world: open to everything, paying full attention, taking nothing for granted. I was discovering a new way to see and a voice with which to say what I saw. My becoming was as much about learning how to be, as it was about learning how to write. Later in the year, news of a tragedy back at home would shatter me, but on the day of the birds I knew nothing but magic.

My diary became my most treasured possession — I wrote in it religiously every single day of that precious, fleeting year. When I left Thailand, I boxed up my stack of notebooks and they made their way to England by sea, dented but intact. Flicking through their pages half a lifetime later, I am grateful to the girl I was then for taking the time to preserve her story — like an insect suspended in amber — for me to pick up and re-live.

Now, my desk is piled with notebooks but I have never kept a daily diary since that year, nor do I expect to again. The looped handwriting that fills those pages is soft and childlike, the sentiments truly felt, if naive. My diary gathers dust in the loft, its secrets safe, but a part of me remains folded between the covers. I was changed by the writing of it; it would be twenty five years before I became a published author, but it was within the pages of that plain, red notebook that I became a writer.

Sometimes, in the moments between waking and dreaming, I find myself walking the Pindamri road towards the old temple, birdsong in my ears and the sweet scent of jasmine catching at the back of my throat. It’s the pause between daylight and dusk — the sky is a rich navy neither darkness nor light, littered with emerging stars. Fading sun streaks the horizon, a strip of pale gold, and the honeycomb stone of the worn Buddha statue waits for me. I am submerged into a sea of translucent blue light and I sink into sleep.

Thank you for reading,

Laura

PS: Come and write with me — I’ll be hosting a Finding Your Voice day retreat

with EASE

in March next year. At a gorgeous venue in Oxfordshire you will find delicious food, a group of like-minded women, and time for yourself in which to write. I will be leading morning and afternoon workshops and I’d love to see you there. Click here to find out more.