When something overwhelms me, I write. I wrote when my grandfather died. I wrote when I felt isolated and alone in the wake of my grandfather’s death. I wrote when my friend Hunter suddenly passed away. I wrote about my waves of unhappiness and my bouts of apathy as a fourteen year old. I wrote when I had been broken up with, inconsolable and aching. I wrote about fights, frustrations and fears. I wrote down conversations that never happened- things I ached to tell people but couldn’t. I wrote letters to people they would never receive.
The words come naturally and quickly and they remain on the page forever as they were when first scrawled. Unedited. Raw. The tears come only when I read what I have written. Tears splatter on the pages that I might read several times until they are soft and worn- but then they are put away.
There, under my bed, lies a stack of memories. A stack of catharsis. Deliberately written in past tense – forever in the past.