I used to write. I used to sit and write for hours, pen to paper, filling up notebooks like the words were a flood and the damn was never built. I would write poetry, pages of it, never knowing when to stop the one I was writing. How could I ever finish something that seemed to come so easily?
When I was writing I was free, I mean, truly, honestly, completely free. Nothing, no one, not even time mattered to me. I would look down during daylight and start to write and by the time I was even ready to stop for a while, the light would be gone and I could hear the crickets waking up. I could write about dreams in detail as if I was still sleeping. Describing colors in ways that you could see with your eyes open. The way my fingernails scratched aged walls that might not have ever been there.
The words still live there, in that place in my head that seems to be out of reach. The amount of post-it notes that I have stacked, thrown away, and stacked again with random thoughts and ideas and things I wanted to write more about later seems to grow but I can never find them. I’m sure if I travel to the unknown land of the bottom of my purse, I’ll find maybe one or two, crumpled and torn and discolored from the lipstick I never seem to open and I’m sure that hair clip I’ve been looking for is their guide to the end of days.
I do write, I still write, I try, to write. But it just doesn’t feel the same as it used to. I’m guarded even from myself. Whereas I used to pour my heart out in my journals when I was younger, now there are thoughts that have lived in my head for so long, they’ve now attached themselves to the walls and will never leave, even if I paint them in black and white pixels here with the rest of them. There’s a wall of glass so crystal clear that I don’t even know it’s there. I’m watching and waiting and I can’t understand why the finish line just seems to grow so thin that it evaporates with the slightest breeze. The river is no longer a flowing current, but a trickle caused by too much debris in the way. The harder I try to pull the pieces away so the current returns, the worse it gets, the more it spreads, and things break off that I didn’t even know were there.
I write. Just not like I used to. Wish to.
Instead I let them sit there until the hose burst and the pressure is too much. None of it makes sense and there’s debris mixed with fresh water and every now and then, the salt flows in but as with anything, it all eventually settles and the current breaks new ground.
