You Will Write Today

YOU WILL write today. Write and write and write, until blood becomes ink and words ooze from your pores. You will drag the blade of your pen across your veins, let black spill out until it stains forever, every every every spot of innocent white paper, until there is no longer anything in you to haunt the beating of your heart.

You will write today.

You’ll release words like captive birds, watch them bolt from the cage you had so often placed them and revel in the freedom they gain by the movement of their wings. You won’t feel them any longer thrashing thrashing thrashing in your chest, desperate for the light and the air and the joy that the sky can offer them. You’ll scrub away every word that doesn’t belong, purge your soul with the tap of the backspace button. Click click click. Gone, no more, erased.

You’ll creep up the attic stairs where night likes to hide your nightmares in boxes labeled as things you need. Every box will be opened, confronted, destroyed. You’re tired of dreaming, tired of fighting the blood, tired of the black that light allows to stay. And when you find love hiding in the energy that surrounds this room in your head, you’ll not panic. Not anymore. Because you were afraid. Maybe you’re still afraid. But now you’re resolved; you’ve got a will of forward movement, two feet that carry you far away and you’ve aged 50 years in the miles that you’ve traveled.

Maybe after all of this you’ll be able to sleep and sleep and sleep. Because you need to rest, need to wake up in the morning and not look at the world through heavy eyes and exhaustion that pulls your body apart. Maybe then you’ll be able to stand those five fingers on your skin, five days of summer spelling out new stories that you can somehow relate to. Maybe then you’ll be able to reciprocate, supplement their tellings with 26 letter combinations into images that make their world brighter and better.

You will write today. Today today today, over and over and over again.

This time the ink will bleed letters to people you cannot face, to people who refuse to face you. You’ll tell one that you loved him, that sometimes you still do. You’ve dance around the idea that in those moments where you still love him, you wish you didn’t. You wish you wish you wish that in the seconds that crawl under your skin, mutating to minutes and hours, when the world is hitting you over and over again that it wasn’t his face, his arms that pop into your head. You wish he didn’t feel so much like home when he wraps those arms around you and holds you to him like he’s terrified of your going. You hate that you love him in those moments. You hate that friend that refuses to acknowledge his love for you. Even when he watches you watches you watches you with those eyes that leave no room for blue, only sky and seas so deep you’re lost within them.

To the other you would tell him you’re tired of hating him, that it’s the most exhausting of all past times, and you don’t want to do it anymore. But then you would have to acknowledge that not hating him would mean letting him go. You would tell him how uncertain you are of doing that – setting him free free free, when he chose to bind you in chains of why why why. It’s unfair. You’re confused. And you hate it.

You will write today.

You’ll hang the sun in the sky, leave it dripping with ink that spills from your bleeding wrists. It’s the only way you’ll ever leave your mark upon it. You’ll pretend in that gentle way of coaxing feelings, that you don’t despise its presence, that you prefer its hot caress to the gentle and all encompassing knowing of the moon. The ink and the curves of syllables and adverbs, nouns and pronouns will be your lie: a lie it burns right through. The moon sees your everything, the sun only sees the things you hang on your mask.

So you will write today.

Breathe today.

Bleed today.

And in the night maybe you’ll finally sleep.