Permission.

Permission

by Shannon Lemire

My mother gave me
my first diary
with a lock
and a key.

The key was impossibly small.

I remember turning it,
hearing that tiny click,
lifting the cover
as though I had just unlocked
a room no one else knew existed.

Inside,
it was only me
and the invisible air.

No interruptions. No corrections.

No one telling me
how I should think,
how I should feel,
or who I should become.

Just paper.

Somehow,
paper knew what to do
with everything I carried.

I didn't have to fix myself.

The page did the fixing.

I wrote until breathing became easier.

I wrote until sadness found a place to sit.

I wrote until the noise inside me
became sentences.

Years passed.

The little diary became
spiral notebooks from the dollar store,
coffee-stained journals,
and eventually
the glow of a laptop screen.

The tools changed.

The girl with the key
never really did.

Then the world told writers
they needed newsletters.

So I wrote them.

They were well received.

But every sentence
sounded like someone else's voice.

Then the world said,

"You need video."

So I stood in front of a camera.

Smiled. Recorded. Uploaded. Waited.

Something in me stayed silent.

Not because I had nothing to say.

Because it wasn't where
my words wanted to live.

So I deleted the videos.

Kept the channel.

Kept searching.

These days,
I write.

And, every page
feels a little closer
to the room
I unlocked as a little girl.

Today my mother said,
after I rented a chainsaw,

"You won't be able to handle the kickback."

I don't think
she was talking
about the chainsaw.

She probably doesn't know
how old those words are.

Or how many versions of them
I've carried—

words that quietly found places
to live inside me.

Maybe that's why
I'm still writing.

Not because I'm trying
to become a writer.

I've been one
since the first tiny key
fit the first tiny lock.

I'm writing
until every borrowed voice
leaves.

Until every sentence
sounds like my own.

The lock was there the whole time.

Until I was ready
to learn

I never needed permission
in the first place

to tell the truth.