Why I Write

Others see black and white, pen and ink, markings on a page.

Others write to make lists, items, instructions, complaints, arguments. 

But I see rainbows and vivid colors and fiery dragons and dinosaurs as tall as a city and aliens from far-off worlds and delicate spiderwebs glistening with the sparkle of the morning dew at dawn and the warm comfort of sunshine to a heart that has never known what it means to feel home and the freezing burn of winter ice on the skin that hides a numb and broken soul. I write to explain, because the world is so beautiful it hurts and pictures can’t do the feelings any justice. I write for the butterfly that alights on the violet in the grass beside me on a hot summer day, making me afraid to breathe because I don’t want to frighten it away, I write for the clouds that look like they were made for angels because maybe they were, I write for the sound of a crashing wave on the shore after the storm has passed, I write for the rumble of thunder that makes me feel so small. I write to try to explain the unexplainable, describe the indescribable, share the ecstasy that is life and the agony of the pain. I write because words are never enough but I try the best I can so others can understand the preciousness of the detail of the light shining through the green summer leaves, the glory of the vastness of the ocean, the never ending beauty of the world around us that we pass every day without even a glance because we move too fast to notice it.

I don’t always write for the beautiful things. Sometimes I write for the pain of a little girl crying out for help to a deaf world that she wants to go home because home is not a place of shouts and insults and the crippling despair that would have killed her if she hadn’t managed to put the bottle of pills back on the shelf just in time. I write for the children clinging to their sanity though it starts to slip away because mind games and abuse leave them starving for the love they deserve from their parents but no one can see what goes on in that house because not all abuse leaves bruises on their skin and how are they supposed to know any better when their parents say this isn’t abuse because they are never hit or raped? I write because I’m tired of being silent, but I’m afraid to be loud, but I need some release or my heart is going to explode. I write for the people labeled “too sensitive” or “delicate” because they feel so much that sometimes all they can do is weep because we feel the pain of others as though it were our own. I write because I am the abused child screaming for help, because I am the woman afraid to speak out, because I am the boy freezing to death in the night, because I am the man who had his light beaten out of him because they told him his creativity was too feminine. I write because I am the voice not only for this life that I have been given but because I am also the voice for those who cannot speak, who have been hurt, who can’t express themselves through words the way I can. 

Feelings washing over me, crashing over my head like drowning under a wave of seawater, dragging me through worlds built of imagination and dreams, the ecstasy of joy and the agony of despair, the beauty of the little things, the comforting embrace of love, the blinding rage towards cruelty and unfairness, the misery of homesickness, the nostalgia of the good times and the struggle of the bad, these are the things I write for. I write because the words pour out of me like a fountain of glitter and moonlight and I can’t stop even if I wanted to because there are things too powerful to allow to fade away into the dusty corners of the past. I write so others can understand that the universe is so full of emotion and I have to write what I feel because there is no release better than words.