Safe Haven

It’s been a while since I wrote a story. Just one where I rambled my feelings to the world, I guess poems have always been simpler to write that way for me. Not like I’ve written a lot of those lately either. But I always will. I will always come back to the written words on a page or to the words I type on my laptop screen. It’s always been home.

Sitting alone in the darkness, feeling emotions I’ve never been able to express in spoken words. I used to write. Write in a book filled with broken promises and tears shed because of them. Write in a book that held the secrets of a child that was too young to be thinking about life the way she did. Write in a book that no one would ever read for it was that preciously hidden.

As I grew up I’ve always known I was better writing down the words I wanted to say  rather than actually uttering them from my mouth. I was so used to being silenced and having no one listen to me when I needed them to, that writing was the only way anyone knew what was happening, myself included. I only came to terms to how I was feeling by writing and it was the one time in my life I felt free.

I could write a story about this girl who was broken and alter her life the way  I wanted to. I could make people listen, make people feel, I was in control. I could let my characters have the life I wanted to live and for those moments where I wrote, I would be transported in their world as well. I would become intimate with my own story, I knew its secrets. I knew its little curves and edges, things when other people read it, would never pick up upon.  But I knew and so we laughed. We had our own little secrets.

That continued on for months until one day, someone else noticed. Someone else read my poems and picked out the secrets it held. Someone else was now aware of the self-depreciating person that I was.For in all my stories while the girl lived a fruitful life, in the end the only one without a happy ending was her. She was the protagonist in the story yet she was the one who was forgotten by the end. Someone else had finally realized that while everyone else appreciated the words she wrote, they were never meant to be happy. They were a reflection of how she saw herself. A main character in her own story , yet so overwhelmed by the stories of others, that she let herself become their stepping stone, the character in their story that helped them up and made them well. She became the person who helped and helped forgetting her own story in the midst.

Someone else had held her and told her not to lie. To use her voice to speak the words she wrote, to speak the secrets she held inside, to speak the words so far only her stories knew she held. I’d never felt more strange, use my voice, how could I? I’d forgotten how to. How to speak, how to ask for help, how to call out for someone to be there. How to scream in anger. The words I wrote were my voice. They were my left hand man while I myself had become dumb.

It’s been years since I was asked to first use my voice yet not much has changed. While I’ve learnt how to talk , when it comes down to my deepest emotions, I still use my written words to help one understand, even if that person is myself. Because this will always be home. My safe haven.

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