learning to stand

When I first started writing, poetry and prose were easy. Words poured and seeped, flowing like melting ice cream through me and onto the page.

The first time it happened around other people, I was at school just free writing for a test warm-up. I knew it was good, better than I should be able to write myself, and my hands shook as I lifted my paper to read it. When I finished, I looked at my teacher. She looked as fluxomed as I felt, and laughed in surprised. She laughingly said I passed the class with an A, but I didn’t hear her, caught in this champagne-like bubble of wonder. I was enchanted, disconnected from everything but somehow feeling like I was listening to God’s heartbeat.

I kept writing through middle school, needing words like most girls need to be skinny. Everything I wrote, I shared with my mom. Being my biggest fan, she told everyone about her daughter, the poet. In high school, I thought she was proud and just went with it. My ego thanked her for the strokes, but I was embarrassed by her evanescence. I alternately wanted more and couldn’t hide fast enough.

Then there were the 90s. Poetry was served like stir sticks with the newly discovered lattes in coffeehouses. I did a couple of readings at hole-in-the-wall places. A local coffeehouse owner heard my work at an open mike night, and asked me to do a personal reading.

I was stupid and oblivious, and made a lovely woman cry. She heard the theme of scars skittering through my work and came to talk to me after the reading. She stood, speaking softly with uncertain words about how she had been scarred as a child, too. Melting like a candle beneath the weight of her pain, she thanked me for what I had written.

I freaked.  The weight of that moment, her pain, my pain. I drowned. When I could gulp down air again, I ran. Like a little, little girl with pigtails and hellhounds on her heels.

No responsibility, no. No weight. No, no, no. Pain and I were best enemies for many years, and I reckoned if no one depended on me, I couldn’t hurt anyone else. I wasn’t responsible for anyone, and no one was responsible for me. It never occurred to me I’d feel ever differently. Just run. That thought alone drove everything.

At some point, I wrote more, because I can’t not write. We were broke one year at Christmas, so my mom had me print off a collection of my poems and prose. We made a list, counted up the paper we had left, and gave out 10 copies.

A lady from my church asked me who Melba was, from one of the works. I laughed out loud, shocked someone actually read my words. From a page. Voluntarily. Even if they did love me.

I responded that she was my grandmother. But my reaction befuddled, and she wasn’t as sure about talking to me ever again. It should have been ok with me, as I didn’t really want people to see what I was doing. I didn’t want to be talked about or discussed like some specimen or non-person.

But it wasn’t, and I hated that my clumsy attempt to protect myself somehow caused her pain.

Now, writing calls me again. All the seemingly intellectually well-founded reasons I stockpiled for not writing look like shed fur caught in the corners of an unloved house.

I am a coward, and for so long, I thought as long as I was honest, that was enough. If I at least tell you I’m going to flake out, then it’s on you. I gave fair warning. But that’s not even an acceptable half-life, and my life has passed before my eyes like some sad instruction film on how not to live a life. A non-life, coated in fear, for which I feel I owe the Creator an apology.

So, following the idea of a life being like a story, here is my written confession. In the conflict of my life, set in a Southern city not sure what to do with itself, I failed the climax test. And although I’d love the chance for a do-over, a do-from-here would be almost better. I screwed up, I ran away. But at least now I know what I did, so I know how hurt other people, and what I should have done instead.


And I won't make those choices again.

Day 25150 of my life. And I’m just learning to stand up.