WHEN FEELING FIND WORDS

Elara was the kind of girl who felt everything too deeply.
She could not simply pass by a weeping willow without wondering what made it droop. She could not hear a song without it lingering inside her long after the last note faded. Her heart was a vessel too small to hold the tidal waves of feeling that crashed inside her.

At first, Elara did not know what to do with it all.
The sadness of a lonely rainy day would press against her chest, and she would sit at her window, silent, watching raindrops race each other down the glass. When she felt joy, it was so fierce and sudden — a burst of sunlight inside her — that she would laugh out loud even when no one else could see the cause. Wonder, too, found her easily: in the flight of a moth around a lamp, in the tiny cracks on an old book's spine, in the way shadows stretched and yawned at sunset.

But Elara’s feelings lived inside her like caged birds, beating their wings against her ribs.
She didn’t have the words to set them free.

One autumn afternoon, after a day heavy with unspoken emotions, Elara wandered into the attic of her house — a dusty place she rarely visited. It was there, tucked beneath a yellowing quilt, that she found it: a small, leather-bound journal with a broken clasp.

Curious, she opened it.
The pages were blank. Waiting. Like an invitation.

She sat by the tiny attic window, the journal open on her knees, and a pencil trembling in her hand. At first, the pencil hovered awkwardly. What could she say? Where would she begin?

But then the feelings inside her pushed upward, like seeds desperate to bloom.
Without thinking, she wrote:

"Some days, sadness is a cloud so heavy it makes the earth bow low."

She stared at the line, blinking. Then another followed, and another, until the page was filled. Pain — the first bird — had found a crack in the cage.

In the days that followed, Elara wrote more.
When she felt a joy so sudden it almost made her dizzy, she captured it:

"Joy is a sunbeam that sneaks under the door, even when the room is dark."

And when she stood beneath the stars on a crisp winter night, too small to understand the universe but too full to ignore it, wonder flowed from her fingers:

"The stars speak in a language the heart understands, even when the mind cannot."

With every word she wrote, Elara’s heart grew lighter. It was as if the act of writing turned her feelings into something outside herself — something she could hold, and shape, and share.

Soon, the attic became her sanctuary.
Whenever pain pressed heavy on her chest, she went there.
Whenever joy bubbled inside her like laughter, she went there.
Whenever wonder made her heart race with questions too big for answers, she went there.

Her journal thickened with poems, thoughts, tiny fragments of feelings turned into songs. And Elara realized something extraordinary: words didn’t erase her emotions — they honored them. Every feeling, no matter how painful or confusing, was worthy of a place in her story.

Years later, when she grew brave enough, Elara shared her writings with others.
To her amazement, people smiled, cried, and nodded as they read. They recognized their own hearts hidden in her words. Her private storms and private sunrises were not hers alone — they belonged to everyone who had ever felt lost, or joyful, or amazed by the simple beauty of life.

Elara became known not just as a girl who wrote, but as a girl who listened — to the silent songs of the heart. Through her words, she had given voice to the invisible: to pain, to joy, to wonder.

And that, she realized, was the magic:
Feelings are wild, untamed things. But when they find words, they find wings.

And in finding their voice, she had found her own.