Words are cheap…

// July 12th, 2010 // Random Writings

Words are cheap…but finding your voice- that costs you. In fact, it costs years of your life, laughter, tears, hate, and love. Finding your voice requires something to say… that something has been lived (well known secret: writers mostly use what they’ve lived as the initial seed of a story).

I’ve wondered at my recent silence. No voice, no words. Just an empty page. I’ve stared at it, I’ve rambled my way through pages and pages of ideas (jotted down usually in the middle of the night over the years), but nothing comes. I just find myself staring, contemplating how easy it used to be, grasping at shadows.

I remember as a teenager writing these sort of beautifully macabre tales about bats and ravens, wolves in the night guiding children through copses of trees inhabited by corpses. My “little stories” (jotted down in nearly illegible hand-writing in spiral notebooks) were speckled with grief and death…the things I lived when I was younger. The isolation I chose after those experiences, though, seems to have largely silenced any voice I once had. Is this what happens when you grow up and move away?

I used to live in the thick of things. I used to walk the ocean paths at night and listen to waves crashing on the shore and wonder about what lived in the dark under the surface of the water. What I wouldn’t give for the sound of the ocean tonight.