by Fendy S. Tulodo
I used to think stories were like engines. You give them fuel, you push a button, and they start. But they’re not. They’re more like lungs. You gotta let them pull air in, even when it’s thick with dust.
I found this out standing in the heat outside a small bike shop: sweat glued my shirt to my back, engines sputtered all around. I wasn’t writing then. I was chasing numbers, noticing burnt tire smell, watching men walk in with hollow looks, each silence different. But later, when I tried to put it down, I choked the life out of it before it could speak.
I chopped it down, smoothed the rough edges, made it neat, like something you’d see in print. Cut the raw parts, like the boy who cried when his dad walked off empty-handed, and the salesman beside me chuckling low, “Next time, maybe.” I erased that laugh because it didn’t sound literary enough.
What I didn’t realize was that every time I hit delete, I was removing air from the lungs of the story.
I started selling motorcycles when I was twenty-five. The company wasn’t big, but it had this strange kind of pride. The owner, Mr. B, used to tell us, “We sell freedom. Don’t forget that.” Freedom was painted on the banners, printed on the flyers, stitched on the shirts.
But when a customer asked me once, “Freedom from what?” I froze. I remember my tongue feeling dry. I smiled instead and said, “Freedom to move fast.” He stared at me like he saw right through it.
That night, I tried putting it down. I called the piece “Freedom and Other Things I Sell.” Wrote the showroom like a church, bikes standing still like saints waiting for prayers. Read it back. Sounded hollow. Trashed it.
Every story I tried to write back then ended the same way: delete, rewrite, delete again.
One of the editors at a small press once told me in a rejection email, “You write around things, not into them.” Didn’t get it at the time. Took years to sink in.
But that’s exactly how I moved through work. I talked around broken engines, around the customer’s money problems, around my own boredom. I learned to smile even when I didn’t believe the pitch. And I carried that habit into writing.
When I finally realized it, I felt sick. Because I understood that maybe, without knowing, I had been training myself to destroy stories for years.
There was this guy who came in every few weeks asking about the same motorcycle. Said he wanted it for his son who’d walked out. He said maybe one day he’d ride it to find him.
He never bought it. He just asked about the price again and again.
I wrote about him, too. Called it “The Man Who Measured Distance in Payments.” Did it late one night in a cramped, rented room, fan clunking, screen glare burning my eyes. I remember typing fast, hands jittery, feeling something real, something raw, like truth after ages of faking it.
Then I stopped.
I read the story again and thought, “Who would care about this?”
The next morning, I deleted it.
Later that week, the man stopped coming. I never saw him again.
Sometimes I think the story disappeared because I killed it. Maybe it needed to exist for him, not for me. Maybe stories are like promises, you break them, and something breaks elsewhere, quietly.
People call writer’s block a wall. For me, it was a mirror. Every time I sat down to write, I saw the same salesman staring back. I wasn’t blocked. I was afraid that what I wrote would reveal the truth about who I’d become.
There’s something cruel about working in sales. You learn to read people faster than you read books. You notice the tremor in someone’s voice when they lie about their budget, the fake smile when they pretend they’re “just looking.” You learn to charm without feeling, to sell something you wouldn’t buy yourself.
And when you start writing after that, it’s hard to tell if you’re telling a story or closing a deal.
I tried to escape that by freelancing. I wrote product articles, lifestyle blurbs, travel guides. Words for money, again. It paid the bills, but it didn’t feel like writing. I started to think that maybe I wasn’t meant to write stories at all, only transactions.
One night, while editing an article about “The Freedom of the Open Road,” I laughed. Because there was that word again. Freedom. I realized I had sold it, written about it, and never actually felt it.
That laugh was the first honest sound I’d made in months.
Mr. B once told me something that stayed in my head longer than I wanted. He said, “Don’t fall in love with the product. Fall in love with the numbers.”
I nodded then. But as the years passed, those words started sounding like something broken, like a warning I’d ignored.
With writing, I’d fixed on the word counts, the due dates, the pay per line. I believed if I churned out enough pages, the feeling would come back. But all I felt was tired.
It took me years to admit that maybe stories need to fail sometimes. Maybe they’re supposed to be messy, uneven, uncomfortable. Like the customers who walked in and didn’t buy anything. Like conversations that never ended properly.
First time I kept a story instead of wiping it, it wasn’t because it worked. It stayed because reading it hurt.
That story was about a small dealership in a hot town where a salesman lies for a living. About how he only spoke true when silence answered.
When I finished, I left it raw. Clumsy lines. I left the awkward sentences, the strange pauses, the words that didn’t fit. It felt wrong but alive.
I sent it to a small online magazine. They didn’t reply. Weeks passed. Then one morning, an email appeared: We liked this piece. It felt human.
That was all it said.
I read it five times. Then I laughed again, quietly. Because it wasn’t about being published. It was about realizing that sometimes, the story doesn’t need to impress anyone. Just live. Just move on its own.
Now when I write, I don’t chase flawless lines. I remember the grease in the air at the shop, the quiet grind of tires on pavement, my fingers shaking as I counted bills. I think about all the people I sold “freedom” to, and how maybe I was selling it to myself too.
Late some nights, I think of that man looking for his boy. I picture him driving far out, road unwinding, wind tugging at his coat. I like to believe he got that bike in the end.
Maybe he did. Maybe not.
But in my mind, he’s still going. And that keeps me writing.
People tell you to “find your voice.” I think that phrase is wrong. You don’t find it. You lose everything else until only that voice is left.
I lost a lot to get here. Pride. Certainty. The habit of deleting truth.
Now when I write, I let the words breathe, even the ugly ones. Especially the ugly ones.
And when that old pull comes, the need to fix, to smooth, to wipe it all away, I hear Mr. B’s words, bent now into my own truth:
Don’t cling to the count. Hold on to the rhythm.
That’s how you keep a story alive.
