Writing Peace

The window near my desk is fogged up against the cold and rain outside. The drops cling to the dirty window screen like tiny crystals.  I’m sitting here in a coveted state of alone.  The whiz of cars on wet streets, the gentle hum of my laptop and the muted clack of keyboard strokes are the only sounds.  It’s lovely.  I feel the quiet fill me.  The space between chaos, to-do lists, shopping, cooking and work is here.

“I love you,” I almost say aloud, to this peace.

Of all the bustling I do in order to set aside a time of calm, is now worthwhile. To feel like I’ve run around like a chicken with its head lopped off and then to lie down and just bleed out, feels good.

As I sit here, it strikes me how much my love affair with writing is growing.  Writing is like that special someone from the past–that crush you wonder what could have happened with.  I’ve had friends who, after dating around for years, ended up coming back to an old high school flame.  Writing is like that for me, an old crush I never pursued before.  Now that we’ve found each other again, as worldly wise adults, we’re so meant to be, it’s ridiculous.

Sure it’s like any other relationship, hard to get enough quality time together; sometimes we fight, or don’t communicate or feel like we have nothing in common anymore.  But when I’m back here, at my keyboard or with pen and pad, I remember why I fell in love in the first place.

This is my home.  From the depths of my soul, to the inappropriateness of my jokes, this is where I can truly be me.  From emotional shit storms to oases of peace, I get to wrench out my guts and throw them down on the table, oozing and floppy, to dissect and cull, prod and discover.  And it doesn’t even matter who cares.

We’re all gloriously messy humans, sad, happy, conflicted or numb, but when we read someone who has been through it too, it becomes more than words, an alchemy of souls.  On the flip side, when you write and someone reads, then emotes, what you had set out to explore (and sometimes even more than you intended to share) – Oh my God, what a feeling!

Those were the connections I made, in my first Creative Nonfiction writing class (which ended this week).  People from all walks of life, being brave, shared the inner workings of their memories, their pains and joys.  People unafraid to explore the emotion of our lives, these are my people.  At 33, I found them, people who feel so deeply, think so expansively, strive so luminously to tell the stories that make sense of our lives:  Writers.