I haven’t written anything in literal years. I haven’t been on this app in that long either. This just popped into my head tonight and I’m so out of practice that I don’t even know if I still got it. I would love feedback from fellow writers. It just feels like the phrases that would once come to me so easily are gone now.
I once was a writer
I once was a writer, a poet, an architect of words on tattered pages held together by a threadbare spine. Too worn down to keep up with the speed at which I fell in love and fell apart. The metaphors sunk into my cerebral and grabbed hold as if this capability was bestowed upon me by the higher power I often scoffed at. Sucking on a cigarette, head filled with dope, heavy lids exchanging tired glances with the lover of the moment. Perched upon the coffee table is a novel (how novel!) with traces of an ivory powder. His lips dance on mine while I trace the edge of my wet glass with a fingertip, stopping only to gently fish out a cube of ice and grip it in between my thumb and forefinger. My fingers go numb. Is it pain I yearn for? So achingly desperate that I feel the tightening in my jaw, a scream suppressed by a clamped mouth that swallows it back down when it threatens to intumesce from the depths of my throat. I am responsible. I brought the damage to their figurative doors, knocked gently with twinkling eyes that gleefully twirled the royal blue baggie between my fingers. I clung on until my nails splintered and drug poor souls whose only offense was loving me down to the bottom. I am cold. I am thoughtless. My home is a damp, bleak cave where the darkness that resides within me is free to prowl. I conjure up the image of a creature, a twisted snarl and bulging eyes fashioned upon a throne made out of bones from the ones who dared to visit. I still perform autopsies on experiences I had long ago and wonder if it is this suffocation I feel that allowed me to furnish pages with prose; a flowing pen gripped by hands that have made such fierce mistakes. My misery demands to be fed, hungry for the blood that will metamorphose into ink. I once romanticized every flicker of life that was breathed into me. I once desired violently a love so all consuming that it tore me apart, layer by layer. I once was an addict and I once was a writer. I fear one cannot coexist without the other. Is she still inside of me? Do I carry her with me forever?
My journal, with its yellow pages and final date almost a decade ago, says no.
