For Country

This is piece I wrote today in class after hearing about a friend who just passed away.
I didn't know him very well, but he was an amazing writer and had a contagiously bright personality.


BY the time I got the news, it was too late, and it's not like I could have done anything anyway, but once you were alive and present and once you were laughing and making us laugh and once you loved your mommas jumbalaya and warm summer nights in the South...but now you can't love anything or anyone because someone ended you with a knife I imagine the neon glow of a blinking sign on a cold hard concrete they made you fade away like the night breeze cools the rice that you used to chase with an already cool beer and I know that I couldn't have stopped them but  all you have now is the earth above and the earth below and all I have now is the pen and the words to write it

Just an object

From a distance, it is  utterly ordinary. Thin and still. One color, maybe three at the most. On its own, useless, not even heavy enough to hold a piece of paper in place against the threat of an agitating breeze. But placed in my hand, or your hand, it is a tool.
It is the tool.
On skin, on paper, on my favorite pair of jeans from high school, the ones covered in slogans and doodles.
Manipulated by human fingers, clutched in frantic sweaty palms. Or calmly sweeping back and fourth. Suddenly words and scrawls are painted across a surface that was once empty.
The pen brings life to the lifeless. As it warms between our thumb and pointer finger. As it rests against knuckle and middle finger. We use it and bring it to life as the words breath life into the page.
Ink flows, words appear, and the pen has a purpose.
Divine and beautiful or angry and erratic.
The words may be terms of endearment or expressions of hate.
The pen is Switzerland. The pen is neutral.
The pen doesn't give a shit of you love or loath.
The pen moves or dries up.
Or leaks and drips and forms little bubbles of blue/black spit across the page as you work.
The pen has a job to do. The pen never stays still for long.
When the words are in motion, so is the pen.

Me Writing about Myself

Having faith in yourself can be terrifying.
Saying YES to yourself feels so scary
I went through and deleted story fragments from here today
Not because I don't want to share with you, but because I want to share with the world

Because.

I have decided to trust myself,
to hope with a heavy amount of realism
that someday
someone
will want to publish words that I have strung together
That means that they can't be sitting here waiting

Just like I can't sit here waiting.

For me,
this act of hope is bravery.
It is part of a series of things that I am doing for myself
In an effort to become someone that I enjoy being
Someone I believe in.

I am staying quiet and listening more
I have gotten rid of the word hate, erased it from my every day vocabulary
I am forcing myself to take deeper breaths
concentrating on the action
waiting for it to become habitual.

I am taking care of myself
Not because I am all that I've got
I have a lot of people
and they deserve the best version of me
And so do I.

Breaking the silence with silence

I have restricted myself to written language today
I havent spoken a single word since I woke up

And it's been wonderful.

The most noise I made was when I ran the dishwasher.
Which is actually considerably loud.

I've spent the day thinking,
drinking coffee, staying warm, and doing this

Staying quiet is a thing that I'm doing just for me.
I'm being selfish and keeping myself to myself
And it's making a little grin stick to the corner of my lips

I'm thinking about all the sounds we make every day
Noises for each other to announce our presence in a room
To remind each other that we are here
To say "you're funny"
or
"I think I'm funny"


It's so nice to just
shhhh
to announce nothing
to no one
for just a little while