By: Jessica-May Cox
I love writing.
I see the world in so much colour. Angry red was never so comforting as words on a page, melancholy blue never felt so much like home as when I fell in love with yet another depiction of the wild, wild sea. It’s burned back behind my eyes in black and white.
I try not to make a big deal about my love of writing, for it is the writer’s job, her very purpose on this earth, to make you forget you are reading. She is the mystery behind dashing dragons and shimmering scales, the golden-haired prince who severs its head clean. But I, unfortunately, am human too.
A callus on my middle finger: a writer’s scar. Symptom of fever, symbol of love – married forever to the work I do. I’m only a writer when I’m not, desperate every waking second to put thoughts to reality. Pen to paper, my rhythm of liberation takes root, it springs forth, the flowers spiral out of control and blind me even more than before. They set me free from the buzzing of my mind. With each tap of the space key, each stroke of the pen, I am born again. I can breathe! Until the next time.
Warmth fills me, burns me up inside, when I write, unite. Of course, how could I do anything else? How could anything real make me feel such a way? It cannot. I need only the swarming in my head, a melodious cacophony, a discordant soliloquy. The journey of endless refinement unfurls up ahead. A chess game with all manners of punctuation. Adjust a clause here and there. Roll a word over, suck it dry with my tongue; I love to know the rules and I love to break them.
The rest is trivial, almost collateral; just meaningless things until the next time my pen meets the page, like meeting an old friend, or kissing somebody for the very first time – sparks fly! A dull ache follows when it is over, I chase that high. What a sorrowful world I live in, if not for you. Because I live through every word put upon that page in vivid explosions of colour, a complicated cascade of terror and joy woven into my life. A tapestry of emotion promised and lost. Every fleeting feeling ever touched is merely something that happens to my mortal vessel, for your true story reveals itself only on the blank page.
A limitless land, with every emotion available to experience to the extreme, right at my finger tips. Nothing can stop me. On a lined canvas: strong sea salt tickles your nose, a boundless blue ocean with waves crashing down on top of you. Yet you are always safe, sleeping in the shade of a willow tree, a birch forest twists around you and blooms of every colour and size flatter your unburdened eyes.
So rip my veins from my body in bloody carnal agony, you’ll find no liquid red. For I may eventually die, but a life in every word of mine has been carved into your soul. I will live forever.
…Do I sound pretentious enough yet? I do think I am not made for this world. I coast by with the promise of escaping to eternal paradise, somewhere else entirely new every night. A place that, in another universe, really was meant for me (and me alone). Alas, for now, all I can do is write.
