Stay

She sits curled up in the window seat, looking out over the lake, clutching her phone, while a breakup song plays through her headphones. The lake she’s watching is surrounded by trees and reflects the mountain peaks that sits as its back drop. The beautiful scenery brings about a nostalgia that she wants to remain enveloped in. Perhaps it’s because she always welcomes the special blend of joy and sadness that only melancholy can achieve. The music she’s listening to adds to that overall effect, though it encourages sadness to the surface of her heart. Somehow, beneath everything in her mind in this moment, she could hear the word “Stay!” clearly.

She spent most of her life running. Not in the literal sense, though she did enjoy that activity. No, from an early age, she learned to run from bad situations, ugly emotions, anything that she deemed unworthy to be dealt with. It was a very metaphorical running, because most of the time it meant spending hours alone, reading about other worlds, wishing she lived with fictional characters, and hoping that soundtrack of her beautifully imagined life would drown out the pain of this world. Why deal with even deeper pain, when avoidance eased the hurt right now?

Being a child, running always worked. Reality need only exist for the important things, distance and fantasy would always take care of the rest. Somehow, becoming an adult took away that illusion, because regardless of the media that drowned out whatever she wanted, it was only for a few brief moments, before she would once again be rudely awaked to the life she was living. Her running was turning into short sprints, with the need to catch her breath.

She doesn’t exactly remember when this word, which was so foreign to her vocabulary, appeared. All she knows is one day, she found that for all of her running, she was unhappy. The very things that she was using to run away from her unhappiness were the very things that were making her unhappy. There was nothing else to replace her avoidance. She had no choice but face reality. It came in fits and starts, though the distance that she put between herself and the unpleasant things of life became less and less. It was a struggle and a mess-and-a-half, but over time she learned to embrace the art of staying.

It’s why she finds herself sitting in front of this window, surrounding herself with beauty as she prepares to sit with her sorrow. Following on the heels of sadness comes a profound rage, leaving her wanting to pound the world with her fists, wringing out the answers to her ill-constructed emotionally charged questions, which she now well knows will make way for peace, the emotion that she truly wants to invite to sit and stay with her as she works through this tragic heartbreak.

In staying, she has shed countless tears, made many fists, cursed ineloquently in sign language, and written thousands of words, which start out dark and macabre, but always end full of hope. She has learned to befriend sorrow and pain, listen to anger and frustration, and always embrace love and joy in the company of all. She’s learned that the difficulties she embraces in the here and now do far more to ease the deeper pain than any means of avoidance.

In the end, she has found that love always win. Love is always accompanied by peace, joy, happiness, and a thousand other emotions; yet, it still always finds room for the unwanted emotions to have a voice.

She chooses to stay. She chooses to keep her eyes open and sit by this window, to acknowledge the emotions deep within herself, even as the picturesque view in front of her becomes a blur as the tears come in waves. She chooses to stay in this moment, because for all of the hurt it is causing now, she knows that it is bringing about much needed healing. She stays because it is by staying that she is able to go about her days, living in this reality, while still visiting her favourite book characters simply for the joy of living in fantasy for a few moments.

When I Sit Down To Write

Sometimes, when I sit down to write, the words just flow.

I sit in front of my computer and before I know it, the piece I have been working on is done. It’s as though I have performed a piano concerto, where the melody is found in the words chosen meticulously, like notes by a composer. I’m able to look over the piece when finished and find that I am satisfied with it, able to easily identify it’s dynamics. The loud and soft parts of the writing bring it to life, still highlighting the point that I am trying to make.

Other times, writing is like thoughts, words coming and going as they please.

It’s as though the art of pen to paper is slowly dying, not just societally, but also within myself. I journal from time to time and then suddenly find that it has been days. Days since I picked up my notebook and let the ink from my pen bleed on the paper or the scratch of my pencil leave behind the marks of my heart on pure white. It’s as though some part of myself has decided that paper is reserved for these forthcoming yet halted words, for moments of privacy or intimacy. Paper has a limited audience of one to three.

And yet still, there are times when writing ceases, when words simply are not enough.

It doesn’t matter the medium or form I try to use. There are no words that are forthcoming, just emotion and jumbled up letters that I am yet unable to decipher. It’s like trying to decode the message without any knowledge of the code. Even other forms of visual communication fails. My hands and heart long for the keyboard or a pen, perhaps even a paintbrush, and yet, I find that hours have gone by and nothing has been formed. The computer remains untouched. The paper remains unmarked. The canvas is like a blank slate. All I am left with is internal bleeding, trapped pixels, ink, and paint that has rendered me silent for a time.

Yet, the beauty of writing is that it is always evolving.

It may be weeks or months long before I am able to write again, but just as suddenly as it when, it comes again. The words flit across the screen of my minds and before I know it, they are finding a way out, demanding to be captured for eternity, rather than just spoken for a few moments and then soon forgotten. They become the lasting part of myself, the living legacy that will one day out live me in a virtual life or slowly decomposing in an attic or basement storage space, perhaps to be read by hundreds or thousands.

And this is why I sit down to write: To find and lose myself and repeat the cycle over again, until the person I am becoming is someone I understand, someone I love for her ebbs and flows, for her soft and hard places, for her joys and sorrows. I write to fall in love with myself and embrace my own brokenness, because I find, through writing, that my brokenness is what makes me beautiful, because I have been made beautiful by the Author of Life.