You’ve Taken All My Words Away

You are the first person to have silenced the writer within me.

For the first time in years, I have no words.  I have no insightful musings nor emotion-studded outcries strung together in a poetic verse.  For the first time in years, you’ve silenced the writer inside of me.

After other men have come or gone, or while they stayed and lingered, these fingers would hover over the F and J, ferociously typing faster than my mind could process.  My fingers would know what my heart wanted to say faster than my brain could compose the thought.   Effortless.  Therapeutic.  Freeing. The epitome of pure flow, the state when an artist no longer feels grounded by time and space, when a peaceful and rare state of nothing exists on one’s mind while their art flourishes.

From the very start, you clouded my mind.  But when given a blank screen and endless time, no words came. Not during the nerve-inducing, hope-straining, anxiety-producing stage of flirtation and trust-building.  To this I attributed an awestruck pause of my mind.  When it came to the honeymooning, stabilizing, whole-hearted loving stage, the cursor flashed and my brain raced in an attempt to verbalize the beating of my heart to no avail.  I attributed this to infatuation with life, for peace, finally.

But when I started feeling the change, when I sensed the impending destruction like the ominous pick up of soft winds before a hurricane, that’s when I needed my words.  I needed the flow.  The pain in my chest, gripping fear in my ribs, tears streaming out of my eyes with hot uncertainty—it all begged for the organization of sentences upon paper.  A construction of the facts, a layout of the emotions, something to look at and know was there and wasn’t going to leave.  But still, my hands hit the keys in a hurried attempt for the familiar, but always, always, were met with just as many backspaces as letters.  I attributed this to fear paralyzing my mind, and I gripped my chest harder.

It didn’t make sense.  I had the lines, the quotes all lined up in my mind.  I made mental notes for syntax and grammar and even made mock titles for their publication that would never come.

And when it all ended, I needed my writing to numb the pain.  It should have been there when you were not.  It should have stayed, and it should have explained what had happened, just like you should’ve.  But it didn’t.

I watched myself cry in the mirror, I pulled at my hair, and I held my throat, trying to get enough air into my lungs as if they were a flotation device to save me from drowning in the unease, in the questions, in the unfinished sentences.  But that’s what they would remain—unfinished.  Undone. Unaddressed and unspoken.

Because for the first time in years, I am speechless.

You have taken my words.  You took them from the start. And even now, as we both remain friends, pursuing new lovers, a dream that turned into a reality that now is a memory we can no longer tell stories about, there are no words.

No stories to fill the pages with.  No poetry to explain those moments.  Nothing to document the feelings and the emotions with. Every experience in my life, good and bad, has been recorded in verse as a means to remember and to reflect and to eventually grow from.  But for you, it’s all blank.

For you, there is nothing.  And yet, there is everything.