Sometimes there is no room for words.
Something sinks so deep inside, it is all I can do to swallow each and every syllable and let the interior walls of my heart birth something from them.
There is much aching and bending and stopping lately. Grief wants your full attention so you quietly settle in and give into all of it’s demands.
Memories have taken up residence in every part of my heart and I can feel the rifling around in there, moving things around, exchanging priorities with duty, lowering expectations, pushing out shallow desires and lifting up all the pure and simple that had found their way to the bottom.
There has been a lot of wishing. A lot of blank pieces of paper with no words or pictures. These words are mine. The offspring of witness. I’ve been putting them to bed in my heart, tucking them in with wide smile picture frames and belly laugh memories. I fold the crinkled edges of each page and gently push them into a shellacked box, kept hidden between secrets and lost dreams, goals set and never reached, the tiny bargains I made and then forgot. And I want to keep them small, all wrapped up in warm assurances, hide them in my deepest pocket, put them where I can still somehow protect them. But they grow vines around my arms and legs until I am forced to sit and release them, letting them grow shoots from this unstable ground.
And I dig my heels into the ground and hold on. And the past rushes past me like an unexpected breeze on the hottest of days.
So I walk in holy wonder and wait for the ground to grow back around me.
So I’ll let the words dissolve into lines and curves and hope that all of the rain will get caught there, right where the pen meets the paper. And I will draw a heart and pretend to put it back together, connecting the dots where no line has ever been drawn before. I will draw flowers around each question mark and inflated exclamation mark.
And I will set them free to swim deeply in a sea of Adriatic blue and ocean green #2. Because these pens have been my little orange ring lifesavers, holding my heart high above the deep sea waters of confusion and wanting.
And a small voice whispers over me, pushing the hair out of my eyes,
“Draw your heart out.”
So I write love letters to the part of my heart that sits on the swing waiting for a gentle push, the part that kicks the dry dirt ground and waits for the return.
And sometimes the curve of the line doesn’t want to bend. It wants to stay straight. It wants to keep things safe and free from hurt. From all of the stops and starts. From all of the moments too soon.
And these busy hands steady the heart.
And there are the pictures you can’t finish because they were meant for someone else’s eyes. So I just draw the outline and wait for some kind of forgotten trust to fill it in with all of it’s color and hue.
And when the sun dips down below the horizon’s edge, I will nurture the pieces that have the deepest scars and softly caress each wound until it has lost all of it’s strength to refuse me.
So, it's here that I sit, in this space of waiting and stare out at all of the beauty, the corners that bend behind doorways and question it’s truth. I look for the seams that hold it all together and pull at the sky to loosen the stitches. I want for secret doors. And I wonder if by just one small touch the sky might break into a million pieces, revealing another world hidden behind it where these lines, these curves, these shapes waiting for color, just might connect to something.
