If a handmade journal buried under a decimated barn on the outskirts of the smallest town in a small state can be found, so can these words.
A fifteen-year-old girl cries on the inside, but can’t seem to manifest tears. The secrets want to stay secret. The child wants to be grown.
She is crying but her face is dry, and instead, she sobs ink. A fountain pen, like her father’s, loops across the page. An error is made and she puts a fine line through it, the way her mother taught her.
Nothing bad has happened.
Nothing bad ever happens because she is loved– loved by great people. They can’t protect her from natural disaster, death, and disease, but they make those problems seem small. They are giants, and she is their precious treasure, cradled safely in their hands.
Still, she weeps. Each tear, a word. Each word, a painful piece of a puzzle that she cannot understand.
An interruption. Her brother.
She smiles. Everything is alright. She promises. She lies. He leaves.
She cries her story out in full and locks it away. She buries it– gifts it to the Earth. The Earth who has the strength to bear it.
The next day the pond floods and crumbles the building around her words. The next week, the remains of the old crumbled barn catch fire. The next month, the area of land is scooped up with her words, and taken far away.
And a year later, or maybe it was ten years later, a kindly woman sends the words of an aching child back home to the one who bore them.
The words are haunting, humiliating, and undrinkable.
A cold, dirty glass of tears.
She tastes it– gulps it– and lives the story again for the first time in years.
The story is a happy one because no bad things happen.
But it fills her with emotion. Every emotion.
And she does not have the strength of the Earth, or the will to ask such a favor of it again.
She is exploding, from the inside out, but there is no blood.
She is bleeding, but her skin is dry, and instead she bleeds ink.
She knows better than to write.
If a handmade journal buried under a decimated barn on the outskirts of the smallest town in a small state can be found, so can these words.
She knows better than to let them spread, but she cannot stop the explosion.
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This is about my writing process. A true story mixed with hyperbolic reactions. I was in a strange mood today. The sort of mood that makes you write things you regret one day later, or 10 years later, because you’re experiencing the emotions of the moments at a high. I wrote a few posts that I knew I’d regret, saved them to draft, and then stumbled upon Trifecta’s weekend challenge. They are asking people to summarize your writing process in just 3 words. I can’t do 3 words for the link up, but I know the process goes a little something like this each time. When I write, I overindulge my emotions, whatever they happen to be. All my weird thoughts kept pointing to this story, and so I wrote it.
I came back to write this explanation just so no one worries or thinks I’ve gone bonkers more bonkers.
What’s your writing process? Do you write at emotional highs for effect, or save those stories for later days?
