Words
Posted on: 3/9/2021
When I was small, while every other kid was collecting pretty seashells on the shore, I picked up pebbles. Shards of bottle glass that filtered sunlight to the exact colour of the sea. Sand that trickled through my fingers, smooth as water. I put them into my pocket so they jingled all the ride home like loose change and I wrote about them. I went to sleep with no lullaby, just the whispering of the breezes that made the mirror-like surface shiver and a piece of paper clutched in my damp hand. The next day all the words would have been blurry and illegible but I loved them all the same. Rhymes that mimicked the rise and fall of mountain ranges. Words that tumbled from my fingertips like crumbling paint on the side of an abandoned house.
These days I’m tired of having words buzzing in my head. Sometimes they wail like sirens, calling out casualties and crimes, street names I’ve never heard of, emergencies. Someone somewhere is heaving with an ache in their bones. A myriad of words only to end up crossed out, crumpled and shriveled into themselves like withered leaves. Blotches of ink, blood clots. The thousand ways of writing about the shades of sunset are starting to wear on me. So is getting the same bad dream every night, the same damn collisions in the dark. Every creaking floorboard is a thunderstorm, every crack on the bathroom tile the residue of an earthquake. The sea is still as blue as ever but books have taught me blue also means sad and I just don’t want to drown in it anymore.
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