There is something in my head that won’t leave me and I don’t know how to capture it, and it’s a picture that I can barely see. It is a ghost of an emotion and a time for me to dwell by the river, and the river is a tree which has a noise that draws me, and that is where I die and where I want to die, and it is where I can fill my heart with the crumbs of earth, and it will ease the pain because the pain has always been there and I don’t know how to remove it, and I don’t want to push it down but I want to make it calm. And I sit by the tree with the willows washing over me, and the water touches my toes, and I slide into the river, and I melt into the river just a little. And I can find a way to take out what I need to take out. But take it out safely in a way that only I can do. And the love that I have for that moment, I cannot ever say.
I can see it is something I can never describe to anyone and I cannot put that in a book. But the moment of taking it out of my heart and treasuring it and not fearing it is the moment I crave. When I write it is not a thing that will make a book but a thing that will see me through hours of writing, and I love this feeling and I fear this feeling. Really that’s why I do not always speak with confidence about my work because there is a piece of me that’s unseen and unfit to be seen. And nobody can see it and yet I feel that everyone can. It’s why it’s so confronting for me to let people read my work but that is part of the telling of the story. So I know I write because I want to have this voice walk safely alongside me, and I know that I can find a way to capture little bits of it. To thread it into my body, my words.
And that is ‘why’ I write.
It’s because I have something that I want to give room to breath. And yeah it suffocates me when I don’t write. And that’s why when people ask ‘why do you write’, we answer with this silly little cry of ‘I always needed to’ or ‘I can’t not’. But it’s so much more deep and quagmire-ish than that. It’s more about the blood in the dirt and the flesh on the bones, and the burning sky, and it’s about the loft of the feathers, and the lift of your face, and the way you can stand again once the pain is woven and threaded gently back into your self.
And I can’t not do it.
And if don’t know how to do it or I don’t grasp time to do it, it wells up in my dreams. And it drips from my fingertips and rips them raw.
It thrives no matter what I do or don’t want to do. They are there, those words. If I write, some day I might find them. Hidden under the rock of lies and life. Things and biscuits and bins and pretty little pebbles or the thing in the cave with its bone-white claws. Crawling up from under the earth.
Because these visions and words and feelings are the tints and tinges I want to hold and know.
When I die, they are mine. Not yours to treasure. Mine to devour and destroy.
