How do you fill a page? I think I’m realizing the empty page only represents the holes in a person. Well, my holes. I write about my holes. My ghosts. Anything gaping or amiss.
I can hear someone from far away in my past calling me a “little shit” as I run down the block with something stolen. A box of Swedish fish or something. I can't see that far, save for my sweet, red mustache. It's been decades.
I don’t steal now. I write. Sort of. Not of late actually. I'm still a little shit. I still hear it all the time.
This is ironic because I have been sick, and laid up in bed, able to write, but nothing to say. My laptop lays beside me, pissed and pushed aside.
“Have you been writing?” he asked on the tellie. “No.” I said incredulously. “Well why?” he mirrored back my in-credulousness.
“I have nothing to say.”
I always think, right now, I can't really walk because God just wants me to lay. To be still. To learn. To write is to be stirred. It is constant haunting. A living word you can’t outrun. And it hurts.
If it’s honest, it hurts. I’m not sure why my words work that way for me. I do find pain and beauty to be siblings, however. So it’s not totally a bad thing. But sometimes, I just need to be still on some level. I don't need anymore pain or beauty. I just need to BE. And most of all, I need to be UNSEEN.
The pain in my spine zaps me. Takes up all the space I have for pain. And my thoughts just lie still. My spine isn’t moving, but the pain alone takes off and I can’t quite catch my breath or my thoughts. It needs a bench. A bed. Some rest.
I DO catch myself thinking of her initials though. She’s in my head. Heart. Same thing. If I write, surely she will come out.
The thing is I don’t want her to come undone. He’s undressed her, bedded her, wed her and up and left Women are much more stronger than them. I want to fill her up, poke fingers into her abysses, cover her holes; complete her with kindness. Stop her from spilling. But I can’t.
Maybe we can just sit and listen to our favorite music. Be still.
He left her to find appreciation. Quietly, I sit with that thought. I repeat it to myself like a question. Where does one go to be appreciated? There’s no appreciation store.
He has holes and no fingers and no foresight to plug them. Maybe he just needs a bench to sit and rest a while. Maybe she needs to learn to drive. Maybe it will resolve itself.
If someone doesn’t feel “appreciated” why is that always the other person’s problem? What if you love them, thank them, hold them, touch them, tell them and they don't FEEL it. Whose problem is that?
Maybe we just all need to fill up empty pages and write about what really plagues us (us) and stop blaming it on other people. Be who we want to be. Every letter a rung in a tree to a secret fort we never knew we withheld. What if we all woke up and looked at ourselves, instead of our partner or whoever, and asked ourselves how we could we be better today?
I believe the holes would start closing. Mending. Souls filling. Loving, unending.
I think my entire life has been about people picking on other people, pointing fingers but never trying to hold someone together. It’s always been picking apart. I was there. I was part of it. It all seems so…silly now. But the danger we must have caused.
And I can’t fill her up, plug her up, keep her in, because she’s good. She’s all there. There’s nothing for me to fix.
Perhaps my letters and words are my rungs, yours may be steps or miles run, or books or service or service or service, but you do have a secret fort M. I know it, M. I have been there because I go to mine. But what the book doesn’t tell you is no one else is invited into YOUR fort. No one else is safe there. No one else can gaze out of your window on a summer day and swat a fly while overlooking a lazy pond nearby. That’s just for you. It’s always been for you.
It was never for him. No one else is invited.
But he is more than welcome to build his own. Encourage him to find the strength to build, to make it look like no other.
Maybe that’s all love is, the encouragement of another to find their fort.
I have many forts. They plug the holes.
