Rituals

My writing has been a source of pity and strength. Writing was my separation from conditioning. Writing was my birthplace, an expression of my condition, and my companion through adolescence when my mother’s disbelieving and disappointed stare shooed me out of her sight without a word and sent me seeking for approval in more dangerous places. Thin pieces of paper with impossibly straight lines bound together in some factory, displayed open before me presented an accepting and objective nature, forming a halfway house for personal expressions otherwise unacceptable. My mother once found that collection of secret pages and when I got it back the pages were brittle from her tears and I lived the remainder of my time with her in utter and tyrannical shame. Writing was a way to mend, speak when power had not yet been revealed. When I found myself aching, when some buried part of myself stirred beneath the dirt, it found a voice through a pen. It shouted words onto paper, and it was like looking into my reflection after denying myself mirrors. Writing is a haunting, and an exorcism. After a bull lulled me away from the home I had built, successfully fracked my resources, and abandoned me in a dark and dissonant land, I continued like machinery. While in the bathtub at night an urge lifted me up and carried me dripping to my desk, where a phantom so precious and bleeding left a message through my hand. And there they were, words that felt like a betrayal to read. Words that had an ethereal aura around them, they sang a hallow harmony to a wound I hadn’t notice yet. Writing is an instinct. When reality started to crack, like glass spiderwebbing after blundersome blows, and I slipped into a story believable only to one who experiences it, writing was an ancient knowledge I could not forget, when days of the week, spoken word and rational left me. As interactions with the outside world became progressively encrypted to the point of being unintelligible, at which acquainting a broken mind can only assume malevolence, written word stayed recognizable. Letters and language and numbers remained true and trustworthy, anyway I rearranged them their meaning did not flee, only changed. They called to me as havens, to offer a grapple during a blizzard, and ring today with strangely fond ghosts, presenting olive branches in gratitude, gracing my cheek in a dawn, their countenance subtly shimmering trials to come. Writing is a rapture for tattered winter coats, and devotedly a spring for adaptations in organic and full hearted attempts to evolve and prosper. Writing left me when I left myself, rightfully so, and has returned with a resounding strike, echoing all the mistakes as I write to distill meaning, purpose, order and power. I write to fashion fragments of cloth from different times into one cohesive layer of identity. Soon it will burn, and I’ll start over again, crafting to better vent the celestial core smoldering inside. I write to reconcile the past and let the child who resides inside me play. I write to construct a me comprehensive to the world, to center my mind and align my motives with worthy outcomes. I write to flag trails in an endless landscape with brightly colored ribbons of knowing in memory. I write to create, imagine, express and imprint, reflect, brood, obsess and sort out. I write to effect, shape and define, purge, rejuvenate, compartmentalize, understand. To delve deep into myself with the trust I will emerge better and with insight useful to those around me. I write to meditate, to provide space for rejected pieces of myself and others to breathe and be at peace. I write to conjure a feeling and encapsulate it, like perfume, to return to, to return. I write to train my vision and observe that spring as the product of processes too deep to grip through reason bubble up to be born freely flowing, and to make the truly abstract tangible. I write because I have grown to do so, come degradation or obsolescence, it is my nature. I write to discover myself, and through discovery learn to love and accept. I write to burn wool and rugs, to contribute to conversations meaningful past my life, to spark realization in another and domino in all directions. I write because I know I’m not the only one.