An Ode to My Creativity

I lost you

Somewhere in between trying to appear beautiful and interesting for other people.

You were the crux of my being, my vulnerability laid bare without limits –

Coasting straight through the middle of life, the heat of life, the white-hot core of life, not trying to be anything other than what you were. Not playing on the surface, not playing too deep.

You were a place to play and be and rest all at the same time...

You were slowly taken, so subtle at first you went into hiding to please everyone around you, all of society, your crux became reading the expression on a judgmental face, knowing what it wanted exactly, providing what it needed to feel okay and safe at all costs – you have been sacrificed to feed the ego of the entire world, the darkness in everyone and everything.

Men love a pretty face. I’ll stop at nothing to obtain one, I’ll grind you into the ground, My Soul, to please, please, PLEASE them all.

And on a quiet night I decide that I miss you.

I ask you to come home but home is a volatile place, you will not come back no matter how much I want, I beg, I control, I feel nothing without you – I’ve left you outside bleeding in a rainstorm, I’ve cut you off from the breath of life you came here to experience and express through “me,” then called you back as though nothing happened, proclaiming myself as a safe space where you no longer have to hide.

But you are weary, and my cold controlling eyes upon you drive you further and further into the storm I exiled you to. I can’t call you home, you see there’s no home for you here.

Your respect for yourself is nothing like mine – you’d never return to a place where you’ve been beaten and skinned, shown and told that you have no right to exist because you’re too much, too big, too different for me – and more importantly, for everyone surrounding me.

I dropped you without effort – no one could see where I was ending and the lie of me was beginning, it was so seamless. I liked it that way, I thought I had control, control over the nature of what I am – but you sat quietly in the dark of my body causing aches and pains, praying to be let out for so long, that now I cannot even see you.

This time it is me – I am crawling to you, I am at your feet, I am trying to create a vessel for you to come home to, I am dropping so much, but still you cower.

Unsure if I am for real.

You won’t come home until I am for real, and the conundrum in “for real,” is that there is no TRYING for “real,” any sense of TRYING and you will stay away. You are too strong to come back to such a hostile place, still there is no space in all the healing, in all the muck of life, aging, weight gaining, you’ve come to see me pushing all that away, fighting against nature is more important than you and now I see clear –

We became enemies of sorts. This whole fight for perfection has been a fight against you. How do I show you I’m dropping all my weapons?

You whisper –

“Show me to the world. Before anything else, show me to the world. Stop sucking in your stomach, stop running, pull me through you before it is too late. I am a very dim flame now. The more hours you sit in a dark room, the more times you don’t say how you feel, the quieter and tinier I will become – even now, I am only a speck of dust in your heart and I have nowhere to grow again inside of it because the heart is too worried with making sure everyone loves you.

So please, pull me through you before I am less than microscopic – save me, stop fighting with me. I am bruised and battered inside all of the places you’ve been hiding.  Every time you hide, I take a beating from you. Please do not force me into being something; some way you have deemed acceptable – don’t care, don’t care what anyone thinks. Just share me because I am dying. I already have so many times before. Shoved, shoved, SHOVED away. You are so strong and I am just water – I am no match for the forces and confines of you, the Earth.

The only way to bring me back is to soften and let me through. I’m hurting because nobody on the planet knows who you are.”

I put down the pen and stare out the window hoping for a miracle, because how will anything come to me if I cannot FIGHT for it?

You do not want me to fight, you want space.

I close my eyes and focus on the darkness inside, the space inside that has never left.

Despite every attempt at perfection.