I was born with a stone in my belly, sinking into the soft flesh and making me ache.
I was a little girl who loved to write. I wrote for fun, forcing it upon my school teachers, begging for their attention through my handmade storybooks about my summer holidays.
Maths made me sick. It confuses me. Numbers are a different language and I only understand words.
Writing was my north point, the navigation inside me that kept my little heart from cracking apart as I sat on the plastic chairs and bit my nails.
A prompt was written on the whiteboard, the squeak of the blue ink deciding which part of me I would bleed onto the page. My peers chewed on their pens, asked the teachers for help, and I wrote away, pages and pages until my fingers ached like the bones were turning to ash beneath my skin.
The words poured out of me and stained the page with everything I left unsaid. The ache lessened.
I won’t tell you how I feel.
The words are too leaden in my mouth, heavy on my tongue. Their sourness makes my eyes water.
They stick in my throat like thorns and I bleed into my stomach until I can find somwhere else to pour.
I write when the need becomes too desperate, when the desire to be read overcomes the fear of being seen. When I’ve left it too long and now they spill out of me, anything to ease the ache.
I won’t tell you how I feel. Instead I’ll crack my chest open and watch as my blood pours over the rocks, staining the jagged edges. My ribs turn red and my heart feels lighter.
I pray it will seep in before it washes away with the ocean.
My fingertip paints the stone with my blood, watching it seep back to the earth from which I came with the words buried deep inside me, stuffed with such a force that I was born with the sickness.
My body lays bent over the rocks.
Hollow and pale, exhumed of the corpses that rot inside it.
I heave a sigh of relief, my chest deflating as it pours itself empty.
It’s ritualistic, the journey I make to the cliff’s edge. The waves crash over the rocks and reel me in, a siren’s call promising me it will all feel lighter when I let go on the page.
The fear mingles with the release, and I find myself smiling.
I wonder if you see me in the words, pieces of my flesh stitched to the letters I spat out so as not to poison myself with their rotting.
The sea sings to me, washing away the stain of my words and returning them to where they belong, tangled in the seaweed until another girl is born with their burden.
Sing me to sleep.
"I wonder if you see me in the words, pieces of my flesh stitched to the letters I spat out so as not to poison myself with their rotting"
WOW. speechless
I stumbled upon this post as it popped out, but woowww, what a fine piece of writing. 👏🏼👏🏼