Nails ticking across a keyboard sounds like a symphony,
if it doesn’t stop, not even for a moment,
if no drum misses a beat and no flute misses a note,
as long as the words keep flowing, the symphony keeps playing.
I find now I have a lot more to say than I thought,
but “saying” is usually where the trouble lies.
If one were to look in my book bag today,
they’d find a mangled mess of dried up pens,
torn and tossed around papers with half-written thoughts
that were written down on a spur of the moment
because I could never say these thoughts aloud
and so they morphed and they grew and they transformed
and these half-baked thoughts became stories.
For a girl afraid of not only her own shadow,
but also her own voice and the voices of those around her,
speaking aloud is the worst thing imaginable.
She turns inward. She hates herself. She hates her thoughts.
And sometimes on her very worst days she hates her dreams.
She cannot look people in the eye and she receives the moniker
“mumbler,” an old joke her friends like to make in half-mockery,
stolen straight from “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” I might add.
She is told to speak up, but how can she ever so do
when she herself doesn’t want to hear her own voice?
How could she allow anyone else to hear the torture of her words?
So she writes them, because in her mind written words do not speak.
It will take her several years to realize how wrong she is.
She writes for herself, for her eyes alone, never fully understanding
that she’s speaking louder than she ever has before, never grasping
that she’s developing the very voice she’d tried to squander
each day that her pens run dry of ink and her nails tick on her keyboard.