Walking through.

Some weeks I have so much to say that I can’t help but spill line after line, an unbroken textual flow onto paper and screen. And then there are other times where I feel the enclosure around my heart go rigid, the snaking wire that binds my lips held fast against the truth escaped. An appearance of placid silence hides the flung anxiety of someone who has not quite got over it. Who is, in her darker moments, never getting over it.

I am reminded in large and small ways that I am not yet sufficiently distant from what has happened. Twenty months and counting, and I am still anxious. Stopped dead in my tracks, paranoid or crying if one of the ghosts should slip into a space still left void. Each time almost free, there another reminder to my fear. There another reminder to loss. There another reminder to hurt.

It is less lately, I acknowledge. But still it feels as though this obsidian fear has come to live in me permanently, though it may flake away bit by bit. How deeply this sits. How foolish I feel for it. And angry with myself for not controlling the heart better in the first place. For letting it be taken from me as though it were not mine after all.

Though perhaps it is not really a solo affair, this heart, but joined and a part of everything. How then do I wall it away? Secret it into a safer place? Not real I suppose, this fantasy of isolation. Not real for me in my need to be understood, to be heard. A sucker to the warm red that livens my lips and my fingertips. Shuffling my feet and grinning ever so slightly as I try to explain the way I make myself break just so.

And then she finds herself again, writing poetic and wondering who cut away the wire. Both hands free, palms tilted towards the sky.