Nothing

When you hurt someone, the act itself hollows out a piece of who you are. A wound begins, somewhere inside of you and you spend night after night thinking about what could have happened. You walk back through the words, the silences. The engulfing silences when both of you have a thousand things to say but neither of you has the courage to say them.

I write all of it down. I write the alternatives. I write the script to moments in my life and then I start believing what the paper tells me. Because what you write becomes somewhat more real than words cutting across the air. Ink is more real than the pulse of another person’s heartbeat. But there’s always something wrong with each version. There’s always something missing with what I tell myself happened.

It’s because I never have the courage to tell people what I want to tell them. Instead, I tell my notebooks. I tell my notebooks everything, and in the end when I am spent, I burn the lot. Mainly for the drama of an open flame but also for the sheer heat of words being swallowed up by something uncontrollable. Because that’s where they’ve been, burning up inside of me. And now when they singe and are eaten away, that’s what happens inside of me. A healing by fire.