To Write
- abbykurz28
- Apr 7, 2022
- 2 min read
I used to write to process weeping sunsets and memories that made up the blur of lives I passed by.
What good is writing, now?
I write to tell a story… I write to simplify a story of its heart; I write to get the message out; I write to get the job done.
Language can be refined to something more dignifying than the story it tells; a story refined can leave out the very craggy edge that gave substance to it.
I used to write to navigate my soul and the world, to knit them together with words: to sew a single experience into my skin so that if it were tugged away, my very being would unravel.
Yes, through words I did knit experiences, people, their stories, shadowed park benches and battered steps and blackened streets into my identity. I felt my way through life by groping for the craggy edges. Pulled back my hand at the touch of refinery; I only wanted those uneven, unpredictable, even painfully sharp edges of the city, the life, the story, the culture, the history, to guide me.
In my pursuit of such divulgence I found myself sitting on a flattened cardboard box on the sidewalk and braiding a woman’s ruby hair in Chicago. Celebrating the birthday of a Syrian refugee at 12 AM in an abandoned storefront’s entryway. Riding in a minivan with strangers to a Greek monestary. Walking city streets for miles in the smallest hours just to feel the grit in my teeth, the life around me, the gap in my step, the craggy edge of the night. Who would I meet? What overlooked person would teach me something new about the world that had been placed as a gift in my clean white fingers at birth?
I thirsted for ink to gradually turn my white skin into something of truth and struggle as I wrote. Who was I to deserve life as a gift when the people I wrote about had clawed through hell just for their knuckles to turn white enough to hang on a day longer?
Damn refinement for the ones it cuts away. Damn the story written on scented paper with smooth edges to justify heartlessness.
Do not hand me this kind of story to write; I want to feel its primal craggy edge with my own hands. I want to look the substance of it in the eye and hear her story in coarse words that are only hers to own. I want to write only once I have sat in the dirt myself and held the white-knuckled hand of the hero, the human life. May I write only to describe the words they have graciously placed in my hands as a gift, the craggy edge pressed into my own skin. May I write to knit our souls together.
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