I stare at this blank white page as if it’s my purpose for living.
Writing is like a rose on its deathbed; feeding off its brittle edges, tasting the blood on its stems.
It’s exhausting; the inner sharp thorns in my mind. They are always consistent at best; a thunderous storm of emotion, a chaos of pure destruction. I struggle to breathe life into them at times, unable to establish vowels and words and prick them out like a gardener in a graveyard, unable to force them on the front lines and speak from my temple.
My body seems to be the culprit. “It betrays my mind,” They say. “It exposes the spikes scrapping along my flesh and the blood boiling in my bones.” Its language is easy and simple to learn, but the layers of the art in my soul…are not.
I presume my soul is protecting itself, always whispering and snickering into my ear like a child in a theater, making me believe I am constantly being harmed. I don’t blame it, though; I don’t blame her for being fearful of the monsters under the bed, of the demons playing tricks in her life. They toy within the strands of the spirit, toy with the predicted happiness creeping closer to the crack of the door. And as I lay in bed bare and alone; nipples at their peak, the soul is suddenly restless. It’s cold and bleak once I cover it with bedsheets, its spine twisted and bent from what’s to come in my dreams. Is it another murdering parent on the loose? Is it being dragged by the feet by an ex-lover on the hunt? Or is it Harry Potter on a pirate ship, casting curses on a student at the bay?
Writing is like a rose on its deathbed.
I write to understand the tears on a rose’s cheek, on the layers hidden beneath the thunder and sun. I write to expose what hasn’t been said and done; what I imagine would be the heart pulsing its voice in the palms. I write to capture the perched owl on a branch at dusk and the frozen bodies scaling the shore. I write so I can speak without interruption, without judgments on the rise, without comments on the tongue. I write so I can see me, so I can feel me, so I can embrace the child and her cries, so I can wrap a blanket around her shaking shoulders and the mountains burying her belly. I write to feel Him bellow along my fingertips, to watch the smooth glide of the pen breathe its name on the pages. I write so I can escape the barrel flung at my sternum and the boulders caging a white dove in the rain.
And whether my writing is read or not, at least it is embedded and written.
So I’ll carve and carve and carve my body into the ink. I’ll drink the Rabbit’s potion until I can no longer eat. God said to give the world a taste of me, and I’ll surely abide the Lord.
I’ll give them the beauty and art of my true nature, of the Beauty and Art of Ms. Charlene.
