The Voices are Back

I’ve been writing about pain for most of my life. I’ve written about loving and losing and transitioning between. I’ve written about people who have come and gone, the ones who stay and eventually leave. I’ve stopped writing many years ago because, in retrospect, there was less pain to discuss, driven away by a delusional belief that it was never coming back.

And so I am here, again, because after years of silence, the voices in my head have returned. And I’m afraid they will only get louder, the way the rain begins as patters and drops on the roof, but is the harbinger of thunder and lightning storms.

Writing was a way for me to silence them. When I was a kid, I liked to read the dictionary, which I now believe was because I wanted words that helped me define what I felt. To be able to define an emotion, an experience, ensured that I could put them in their place, write them somewhere and tuck them away. This was the power of words: a definition wraps my pain, identifies it and categorizes it, so I can discuss it and dissect its meaning, find other words to help me understand it and know its intentions, and finally be able to write them down so it flows out of my body and onto something I can hide or release or burn.

For many years that has worked because I kept writing. But for a while now I haven’t and the voices have escaped their prison in the sky and now snap and crack like electric bolts of light shooting in indiscriminate fire.

Someone once asked me, just recently, if I was lonely. I lied and said no. I made a silly excuse about, for a long time, never wanting to be with anyone because I had always believed I did not need anyone to be complete. This excuse was partly true, because I had never really known what it is ever like to be complete. (Does anyone?)

And so I was consumed by the thought of my emptiness, never having perceived it so intensely until someone introduced it to me. It scared me like an oncoming train while I was chained to the tracks and unable to free myself. And maybe that person knows it. I can only lie so well before I end up giving myself away. And if my theory were ever true, it pains me to know that I may have driven another person away before having moved forward with something more.

So I’m afraid that you will probably see more of my writing soon. The ground has opened up beneath me and I am falling into hollow darkness, in all likelihood headed back to where I started.