Breathe Me In Words

Since I can remember, well, anything, I remember being fascinated with words.

Mama read aloud to me every night before my twin brothers were born. The Wind in the Willows, The Velveteen Rabbit, and Rudyard Kipling's Just So Stories dallied in my burgeoning mind. The painting of a blank canvas with the vast palette of literary hues awakened my very earliest proclivities.

Before I started kindergarten, there were school bus yellow phonics books with stickers tasting of cherry cough drops when I licked them and wobbly-crossways stuck them onto the page. I propped myself on thin elbows devouring the ways the alphabet made its myriad sounds, softly whispering them aloud to myself and marveling at the magic of creating something from a bunch of seemingly random and disparate marks on a page.

In school, my first teacher--Mrs. Miller--was so excited about my reading skills, she took me to a special meal in a restaurant near the school and asked me to read the menu aloud to her, which I did. She bought me two desserts for breakfast.

By first grade, I acquired the first of many bubble gum pink legal pad pages and started penning my own fairy tale of Betsy and Ellen--the two little girls who homesteaded in the woods of North Carolina with their talking cat. I would awaken early on the weekends, pull the pad from beneath my mattress, and write for hours before my brothers came crashing through my door, noisily and incessantly demanding attention.

I haven't stopped writing since.

My writing has adopted countless forms: from language arts curriculum to soppy love poetry penned on beer-stained napkins in the rock-n-roll bar; from high school journalism to my doctoral dissertation. I've written on airplanes, beaches, cabins, classrooms, cars, buses, and porches. I sometimes carry loose leaf paper in the back of a book so I can make notes when sans phone or computer. I have half-scrawled thoughts on coasters or even smeared ink across the palm of my hand.

Writing, for me, is life. It is more than a love, more than a mere hobby or passion or something to do when I am bored. I have studied the craft my entire life; I have honed my skills, attended thousands of workshops/conferences/seminars and still, I do not know nearly everything there is to know. I never will. No one will. I can only continue this practice--reading and writing, developing and trying, discussing and editing and deleting and starting from scratch once more.

There have certainly been periods when the words escaped me. My supposed truest companions hid themselves away in shady corners of forgetfulness and lost. I deemed myself busy or uninspired or exhausted. Or there have been times I've written scores of words that seemed necessary in the moment, only to make their way into the flames of a lighter or the anxious jaws of a pair of scissors so no one could ever witness their being.

But I always return to the words. The words lift me from the hard seat in which I am sitting and spin my mind into another place. I write my sadness, my lust, my fears onto the page and they occupy a new form beyond the amorphous ghosts of my captive brain.

Remarkably, my diligence and fervor paid off: My first book of poetry will be published this summer. It's a dream I've always entertained and never abandoned--no matter how busy or uninspired or exhausted I often am. But the work does not cease here. In fact, I find myself only bolstered to write more than ever before.

Writing is not always a pleasure. It is not always fun nor easy; it serves many purposes and takes on ceaseless forms. But for me, writing is life. Breathe me in words and I am there--watching, scribbling, patient and solitary: alive.

~

©def, 2021

d.e. fulford is a full-time university writing instructor and author of the forthcoming poetry chapbook, southern atheist: oh, honey (Cathexis Northwest Press). Thank you for reading!