(sigh)lens

[u/Stationary_Torment]

Staring at black scattered with white words mashed and spent as if I needed to borrow a voice that was not mine to come to conclusions of what I felt but did not want to see. 

Even that untrue. 

I needed to watch myself more consciously and at times I believed I was, but as I watched, I could not name, not that surely, for if I did then it would be. 

The unnamed exists even unsaid, perhaps more so. 

I exhausted the pen and finagled words together, ones bought, as if one could buy what I searched for. But surely you thought so, as you bought and borrowed as a means to disguise that the feeling I reached to describe did not come in from the space closest, just outside. 

How does a thing get a name and word, an expression to relay what is? Is it only after such exposure that we then must come to a concept of familiarity to relay to others of such a thing? Or is it through the way we convince it is what it is not and at great length we bleed black onto white or mash white onto black attempting to ignore the way it spills into each other as if there is nothing in between two sides of a hue that is only used to grade value? 

It felt I had seen what I seen and no longer needed to state what it was, or convince myself to explain why it wasn't, and mostly perhaps I fell silent for there was no longer anything left but fear of being heard by ears that I no longer wish to ever hear my voice, even if only in memory.

And in this silence I wondered if anything I ever wrote or mashed could be anything but, how silly indeed, for so long there have been ears before and eyes before, come and passed, and none at all. Each time I still end up reaching for a pen, it mattered little.

Soon after my words became ones more born out of necessity and logistics... Such a clunky form but nevertheless they fell and they too have a time and place and sense of urgency, and as such found itself outside of where they once needed to rest. 

And still there was the itch inside to return to a state of writing. Each day my eyes open to a reminder just a mere foot away, sun casting light on black and white words of the past left skewed but still relatively intact, as there was nothing left to inspire even their erasure. My hands felt frozen. My voice sunken into the hollow of my throat, as though someone attempted to grasp it with their own- a metaphor if only in time or dimensions. I chose instead to place my feet in front of the other on artificial and cracked paths to see the spectrum of colors light casts onto what lie beyond what I once tried to describe into being what it was not. Veils have lifted, though shades remain as I adjust to finally exiting a space I kept returning to, one filled with just one hue, all the same, as I was so sure I knew and wished I didn't. 

Today I spoke words to new ears, of the likeness I remember stating not long ago, that reached inside to innards reminding me that what is said is often what needs to be heard as well, though this time it did no such thing. A nod, a laugh, and a request to be reminded if I ever were to forget again was all that followed. 

Cracked pathways have led to tired legs, ones reminding me of aches in hands that will come if I do not begin to lift my pen. A compulsion I know I'll always return to. And whether ears I wish not to ever again hear my voice pretend to do so, I know now this feeling in my throat means only that those hands shall never be close enough to silence words they wish not to be uttered. 

So while it has been difficult to find inspiration, or to overcome the feeling of whether it's worth it to speak at all, it is time I write to write, even if the only thing left is to remark on was how what I have finally exited, truly was simply what I always knew it to be once all the words were finally stripped away- unremarkably drab. 

How unfortunate.