where my words went.

I'm sort of in this chapter of my life where I keep trying to open the box that holds my creativity and it's only filled with a bunch of used paints and broken crayons. Embarrassed and sort of disappointed, I usually close the box, slide it under my bed and act as if I had never seen it in the first place. The state of me breaks my heart.

Do you remember the time, about one year ago, that I wrote about myself as if I were a tree? A tree that got to shed it's leaves, and go through seasons and show my vulnerability in all my nakedness but show my newness when new leaves grew back? Well, right now I feel less like a tree and more like a leaf that fell quietly and unnoticed to the ground. Just another crushed up leaf among all the other crushed up leaves.

I deeply associate my entire being with my writings. My stories, my poetry, my words. Now that they are rare, who am I? I am boring. I am empty. I am speechless. I am tired. I am numb. I am a dead leaf, among all the other dead leaves. Not anything special, beautiful, or meaningful. Words no longer flow out of my hands into short streams of metaphoric lines and bone breaking beats. They don't even rest in my soul anymore. My box is almost empty.

Recently, a lot of people have been coming to me with this question, "when are you going to write again?" and each time it's like they're punching my soul and breaking my nose. What do I say when I feel as though my words have gone missing? That I have none because I am quite the opposite of alive? That I'm so angry because I thought with Christ I was supposed to be alive?

I guess for now it's a whole lot of waiting. It's the tapping of the pen waiting for the words to come back. It's the tapping of the watch waiting for the adventure. The adventure that makes my heart come barrelling out of my chest and makes my palms sweaty with impulse. My mind an utter commotion. I miss that. I crave it so badly. And even the most precise recipes I have been able to imagine do not produce the aliveness I once had.

Right now, I'm trying to have faith. I'm trying to hope that one day, I'll be alive again. I'll have it back. I can tell you one thing, though...I want to be off these meds soon. I'm positive they are numbing me. They are destroying my poetic self. They are destroying my preserved metaphors and language and rhythmic alliteration. Everything I had held so deep as my artistic way to deal with it all .

But for right now, this moment, it's empty and straining. It's difficult and enduring. It's broken-nosed faith.