Sometimes you are just left, standing in the centre of yourself while the debris of experience floats to the ground all around you. You can never go back. The only path leads forward and yet you're nailed to the ground somehow, unable to move, hell, unable to react. Just standing like stone, lips apart in a gasp of total disbelief, eyes filled with tears that will not fall no matter how hard you try simply to move, to do anything at all.
Sometimes you are reduced to tears, surprised by yourself, surprised by your own strength, your own choices, your own will to change that path, to find a new one even though you know that you'll get scratched and bitten, that it's dark, dangerous, unexplored territory. Unexploited. Knowing that if you make the wrong choice you can't go back and so you can't fail, dammit. Only you're not strong enough and you can't find it by yourself and that's when you're so close to giving up you can taste the bitterness under your tongue and you refuse to savor it.
Well, that...that's when you know that maybe you're not as weak as you once thought.
Fragile, yes. Without a doubt in their minds, or even in yours.
Weak, no.
The unheard gasp confirms that you have faltered and then your words take the wind from your own sails, because you don't hear the questions. You don't hear your loved ones seeking out their confirmation. They are left to wait and watch and read, later on, when you can close your mouth and the tears fall at last. And then you write. You pour it out, a deluge, and it tumbles and spills all over the page and it's a mess. But you...you take your time, and you shakily get down on your hands and knees in the bright lights you have brought in just for this purpose and you arrange and reaarange those words on your canvas and soon the picture comes into focus and now they know. Now everyone knows and you can rest.
Because the letters mean everything, and the words mean nothing and sometimes it's the other way around and sometimes, just sometimes it's not clear and it won't become clear and you just don't care.
Nope. Bridget, sometimes you just don't care if anyone can figure it out.
The most touching thing in the world, in my world. Don't you see it?
I could sit here for hours arranging my letters, trying to give them meaning and failing.
I refuse to fail and so the hours pass unwillingly. My neck aches, my shoulders shake. I can't get it out. I try so hard and still nothing falls into place. Some days are like that. Sitting frozen at the keyboard. A statue of a girl who can seem so animated and yet so stiff.
And then two large, tanned hands slide over mine, arms around my shoulders to reach the keys, and the long fingers will type out a word, and isn't it ironic that it was the word I was looking for all this time. And the stopper is removed and then the meaning falls into the jumble and I can fish it out and rinse it off and nail it to the page and everyone knows then. They all know because all this time he knew. He knew exactly what I wanted to say, but he was never going to say it for me. No, he knows more and it comes easier for he rests without such a heavy heart. And when he is rested he holds the light and shines it so that I can see. And when I find it I fix it in one place so I won't have to look anymore.
Completing the sentences is why I am in this place. Because when I can't finish it, he can.
