(Topic: Effects of grief, reading/writing)
To the teachers who told me I was a good writer:
Was I really? I was an avid writer. I loved words, and playing with their sounds and cadences. But was I a good writer, really? I wrote so much in college, but it was rhythm and sound without soul, empty. I look back at the poetry now, so many pages of it, and so much of it is hollow. Did I write well? I wrote. I practiced, I learned techniques, but I hadn’t lived.
And now, the bottom fell out of my world, and I cannot write. I stare at a page where before, poetry would have danced out of my mind, and it is blank. My pen hesitates, and I cannot form thought to word. I am stuck, in the place where my soul wants to cry, and my voice is broken from weeping. Is that why my poetry was so flat? I hadn’t had my soul rent, and so I thought dancing words was all there was? Now my soul wants to wail in beauty and instead I am locked in silence and pain.
There is beauty in my brokenness – I see it, my eyes are not blind. I see, I hear, I feel so dangerously at the pinnacle of experience, so many things at once, yet find the words abandon me, the phrase-music is tied in the knots of my pain and I cannot sing it.
Yours,
Sarah
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