To write is valiant — Dec 17, 2012
Written: December 17, 2012. Edited and Posted: October 2022
Sick: 2.5 months.
I often feel cowardly as I desire to escape my reality by living inside of books, where I hide from harsh truths beneath soft paper blankets and find comfort as words are stitched into my skin.
Every word read becomes a part of my soul.
Only after bleeding to death in a foreign reality can I resurface with a desire to change my own.
For me to write is to bleed.
For me with these words: to write is valiant. To write is to record my soul.
Every word written dangles in the wind, anchored by the string of my insecurities. I am the one who holds the knife. I hold my words captive. The tongue may be a sword but in this day and age the fingers hold the keys. The cord of a guillotine once severed
enjoys the flight of a kite.
Vulnerable and steadfast my words await the guillotine, but wish to fly.
One day I hope my words will stitch themselves into another’s skin and provide a blanket of refuge. Then I will have passed forward a kindness I’ve taken advantage of far too often.
But before they touch others my words reach me. I must believe in their weightlessness, in their ability to be the string and not the blade.
Blades and kite string slice the air.
My words soar.
Releasing my words is a necessary end. Their release sets me free.
And kills me.
Because in this internet domain: A writer is no coward.
Shakespeare wrote, “A coward dies a thousand times before his death, but the valiant taste of death but once.”
Never was one for much Shakespeare. Give me Maya Angelou or Madeline L’Engle (with a dash of Cleo Wade among many others) and I will melt into the wisdom resting inside their words.
I say a typical writer may taste death only once, but dies the death of a thousand souls. Flies the flight of a thousand lives. And if I release the blade, the rope will fly like a kite. Always tethered to me. But soaring beyond my reach, cradled in the arms of the wind, wooshing through the blue and light. So much light. That is where I want to reside. In the arms of the light.
I write for the flight of the cord and not the fall of the blade. I write for my soul, for other souls, for the blanket of refuge–no matter how many deaths I must die. For through every death shines a broken and beautiful life.
Fly free, oh my soul.
Welcome to the light.?
