A crack of light, a string of pearls

To write you have to be introspective. You have to quiet yourself in this certain space enough to connect to the undercurrent of your mind and feelings. You must go beyond emotion and thought, furrowing into the folds and layers, until you reach the pulsing, beating truth of things.

For a long time, I have hesitated to go there. Instead, satisfying myself with riding the surfacy, turbulent waves of experience, letting myself be thrown about, equating experience with reaction. To write, you have to go to this internal place that is more appropriately described with words like “source” and “creation.” You see, writing means seeing past the busy humming of our minds or spill of words from our mouths. It means seeing the fleeting look of fear, of longing, in the face of another or in the reach of their hand in the mundane processes of life. It means going there. And I just haven’t wanted to recently. Or more appropriately, I haven’t wanted to for a few years now. Maybe even since those first months of college when my last remaining innocence was burned through like a wildfire – leaving deadness and the smell of resignation in its path. Little by little, I closed up; softly and discreetly with only sad eyes and a wildly beating heart as evidence.

I stopped looking, really. And looking is what writers do; that is how they see the story and feel compelled to tell it. I’ve only known the type of writing I’ve needed to put on paper. Where my hand hungered to give words to that pulsing, beating truth of things. So for these passing years when I haven’t looked, when I closed up so quietly I did not even notice, there has been nothing to compel me to write. And then I sit here wondering how to get back to a place where I knew how to explore myself and others. Where I would watch the boy in the airport all bent up inside himself, and tuck him into my memory so that I might write his story – this fleeting glimpse of his life – where for a moment he was known and seen. Where I would see love so thick between two people I would reach out my hand as if to scoop it up and let it squeeze through my fingers. I can’t quite figure out how to get back to that place, that kind of existence.

I can only measure my movement in writing, and that comes eeking out painfully and full of fear. And writing is not writing when it is poisoned with fear. Writing is beautiful for the very reason that it sets free truth. It brings release, because something more is known; something is expressed and therefore exists in place and time. Fear has no place in this organic rite of passage. Fear stifles, it suppresses; it deadens you until you become accustomed to its numbing effect and then stop… furrowing, connecting, going there. So you wait (and you don’t even know you are waiting) for this moment when there is a crack of light. When you get out – for just a breath – from underneath the suffocating weight of emptiness and see a fleeting glimpse of that freedom. Or in the normal hum of your day from nowhere comes this whiff of the past or electric bolt through your body that reminds you of when you weren’t so… closed up. The crack of light, you know. You wait then, for it all to come rushing back. The raw, exposed feeling of searching for that undercurrent. The rush of words that the scene before you floods into your mind. You wait for that moment to plunge back into the deep down truth that lies beneath the actions and experiences bubbling to the surface. But it doesn’t work that way. The passageways of introspection must be tread on softly, lightly, patiently.

I must ease back into myself so as not to extinguish the flickering flame that is left. And then slowly by slowly, string words together like little pearls of truth emerging from the gradual opening of a clammed up soul.