To be

You ever felt out of breath? Multiply this feeling with infinity and that is literally how it feels when I cannot write. Pale, a feeling so colourless. My words are turning pale and the odds are not in my favour.

I want to be able to write about the tangerine sky and about the white orchids calling out to me from the hills I grew up in. I want to able to sketch my heartbreak into a poem that dissects my tears into metaphors explaining the anatomy of pain. I want to be able to write the lyrics for the melody in a child's innocent eyes, a farmer's hard work, a soldier's day with her family, a friend's jokes...the list goes on.

I can laugh, I can cry, I can do all of that in neat shots distilled like the water in Victoria Falls but the inability to write pushes my universe into a black hole. It does not end there, when I force words on paper it turns into a futile rhetoric with superficial aroma and this artificiality is harmful for my health, I feel sick when I get down to function as an inanimate object.

Writing is the drug that keeps me going. I need it to live. I need it to be my life jacket when my self-esteem has near death experiences. I need it to try and understand funerals and why I freeze in the presence of bodies resting in caskets.

"In loving memory of a woman who lived to write and wrote to live." An inscription I see on my epitaph.

Peace be upon me.

©songbriti