Creation

She looked at me knowingly and asked, “Are you a writer?”

I sheepishly pulled the words that drifted from me, black against my fingertips, back under my skin. I could tell from her expression that she could still see them, stark like a startled freckle.

“Yes,” I said, and in my voice I heard apology.

Words lie thick on my tongue but I never asked them to be there.

Of course, I heard her thinking. That explains everything.

I looked down at the lines of my notebook, my fingertips stinging. I rubbed them together absently and picked up a pen.

Sometimes they sit deeper, these words, and when I call them they groan like a stubborn root lodged in the earth. I work at it, scrabbling in the dirt until my hand is aching and the page is scarred with my effort. But slowly, slowly and all at once it pulls free and I fall back with relief.

Other times my hands grow stiff with the unwritten and it’s all I can do to hang on to the pen as it races against the page. The words fly like the crash of a river on the day the ice breaks. I am breathless with the rush of it and I worry, sometimes, about what lies downstream of this torrent.

What guidance can the muddy bank offer when the water seethes with rage and restlessness? What good are these lines, these pages, this pen, against the onslaught that pours from me like my very veins have opened and are seeping out black.

Where else could they come from, these words? Scoring dark the page before my mind has fully thought them.

I see a haze, a forest in the spring and the green smell of sap and earth is dizzying. I see a picture of the river in my mind’s eye but I feel its current deep in my chest. That’s where it pours from and so my veins are the only pathway I can think of to lead these words out into daylight, shivering and heaving great choking gulps of alive. Pulled from the deep and shaking with the elation of cold water. Emerging from the grand and terrible reality of earth, the wildest we ever get. And now here, subsiding from the fury to rest in the sun.

My startling creation.