“I trust noth­ing es­pe­cially my­self and slide head first into the fa­mil­iar abyss of doubt and hu­mil­i­a­tion and threaten to push the delete but­ton on my way down, or madly erase each line, pick up the paper and rip it into shreds - and then I re­al­ize, it doesn't mat­ter, words are al­ways a gam­ble, words are splin­ters from cut glass.”

–Terry Tem­pest Williams

I’ve got this old cedar chest half-filled with jour­nals. Stacks of tat­tered Mole­sk­ines, 70-page col­lege rule note­books col­laged with old cal­en­dar prints, a few grid­ded Rite in the Rains from that time when I lived out­side. I fell in love with a per­son, a place, an idea, a feel­ing. I wrote fa­nat­i­cally and des­per­ately, but I wrote to per­fect those mem­o­ries for a fu­ture self — I wrote final drafts, caged be­tween the lines on the paper. Lord knows I be­lieved I could im­mor­tal­ize those blinks of time in paper and ink, but even this pho­to­graphic mem­ory can tell you that it’s not the words that stick around longest.

You know, I burned one of those jour­nals. I ripped the pages from an­other until I could no longer rec­og­nize the words but as fuel to a fire. I danced with the fumes of lighter fluid, filled my nos­trils with the sul­furous af­ter­math of a stricken match. I swept my hands through the hot air and teetered on the thresh­old of pour­ing my whole self into those flames. The pages fell apart and the ink and pen­cil smudged and faded.

I fell out of love with a per­son, a place, an idea, a feel­ing and Lord knows I clung to those in­ten­tional words I had writ­ten. Writ­ten. Nearly a year passed and blank page after blank page kept star­ing. “Fill me up.” How can I fill you when I can’t even fill my­self?

Writ­ing had be­come this rit­u­al­is­tic process that bore a heavy bur­den of re­spon­si­bil­ity, until nearly every­thing that went to paper was so ex­act­ingly con­structed. You know that bull­shitty feel­ing that can man­i­fest when you skip to some end with­out ac­knowl­edg­ing how you got there in the first place? For the sole pur­pose of the pur­pose, to see noth­ing of what re­mains? It hurt my hand, and my brain, and mostly my heart be­cause I craved that I could sit and doo­dle and write non­sense. Or things that ac­tu­ally meant some­thing to me rather than the things I thought should mat­ter. You know? Writ­ing with my glass shards. Numbly bum­bling, fum­bling for some idea of what I thought or was. I knew it had got­ten bad when the guy on the bus asked me if I al­ways looked so se­ri­ous. I don’t think I smiled back.

I needed to get it back. I needed to get my­self back. Breathe when you can’t rec­og­nize the per­son you see in the win­dow re­flec­tion any­more, and see if they too in­hale.

One day I walked to a cof­fee shop with a stack of lined paper under my arm and a cou­ple of pens in my back pocket. I sat in a quiet cor­ner and let my legs bounce ner­vously, mak­ing the small table quake un­con­trol­lably. I looked down at my hand and found my fin­gers twirling one of the pens. I for­got I could do that. And then it started.

I kind of love how things fall out of my pock­ets when I bend down to pick up my dropped pen or pen­cil. I kind of love how the tex­ture of the lead, the flow of the ink changes upon being bro­ken. How the tex­ture of time changes upon being bro­ken.

Some­thing started as soon as I stopped tak­ing my­self so se­ri­ously. I fell in love with the rose­mary in my pocket and sleep­ing with my win­dows open, the smell of cin­na­mon-spiced quince on the stove and watch­ing my cur­sive scrawl take over a page. I no­ticed the scars on my hands and the way it feels when my eye­brows fur­row if the light is too abra­sive. I started lis­ten­ing to the creaky floor­boards and the shud­der­ing of my door on windy days. Fill me up. And over­flow. I write my­self back to­gether. I write be­cause the words don’t mat­ter.

Now I crack open new note­books with­out think­ing too much about it. Fear­less. Cathar­tic. Out of habit. Just writ­ing. I prob­a­bly won’t look back on the words that form. When the pages are sat­u­rated, I’ll file them away. And one day, when the stack gets too high, I’ll burn those too, danc­ing on the edge of the flames.

Kris­ten Mit­tel­steadt