Cracks

What happens when you stop trying to shape your thoughts? What happens when you outpour the mess of your humanity, lay yourself bare before the light?

Write 500 words without stopping. That's what you do when you have no words at all. Pry them out of yourself if you must. Pull your voice from its cage in your belly and let your tongue dance if only just to savor the muscles flexing and the blood flowing and your animal flesh and bone reaching beyond the finite self.

That's how you teach yourself to breathe. You stop holding your breath. You let it flow, let it rush to the surface and burst forth in a surge of uninhibited song. Who cares who's watching? Who cares what the world thinks if you are honest? Truth and illusion wrestle for the spotlight, and far too often it's illusion that draws the eye. The truth is often painful to swallow - a face full of cold water that pries the pretense of control from your grip. The predictability of practiced lines and blocked scenes are far more appealing. In the act, every mistake is intentional. We swallow stories of tragedy, but our own threaten to swallow us whole. That's why we stuff our mouths full of words and silence. Both are a blanket against invisible sorrow.

We do all have that, right? That cold terror of living? I mean I can't be the only one with this raw black hole throbbing in the pit of my chest. Do my eyes betray it? Can you see its swollen, growling stomach, begging to be sated? Where did it come from? Which star became ash and bore this howling monster from its death? I have died so many times, again and again, to myself, to the people who love me, to this world. I have forgotten my name and place in this body and time and slipped between the cracks in the clay. Underneath form there is emptiness. Delicious, lonely emptiness. Do we all escape to a chasm beneath our skin? Do we all cherish and fear it?

Looking around the grocery store, shaking a new friend's hand, I wonder if I am the only one, if I am sitting on the edge of something that was never really mine to begin with. Am I the stranger or do we all feel foreign in our bodies? Are you, fellow human, just as terrified as I am? What do you do to abate the fear? How do you tug yourself up from paralysis?

Write 500 words. Move blood and thought and fingertips one letter at a time if you must. One step forward, two words back. Don't overthink it. You don't have to sound like Shakespear or Plath or any of the other immortal world changers. You cannot sound like anyone but yourself and that is your gift. Only you can shape your breath into stories.

So, who are you?

What is it you would like to say?