Words and Seasons

My fellow writer and I were musing the other night, as we often do, in a little cafe with a perfectly clear night sky and wine as smooth as the breeze surrounding us. We were bemused by the fact that when life is at its most voracious, offering so much content, we find it impossible to write. We have made a craft of turning the mundane into an adventure, finding the beauty in the ordinary. With this season of near manic reality, words just seem to fall short.

My writing has been a reflection of my life this year in that it has been fragmented and frenzied. When I try to control the flow I render the words contrived and empty.
There is a dark, deep truth in the pain soaked words that mark the beginning of this year, this amazing year. It began in the winter, a winter so cold and dark and bitter than I was wrought with a near obsession with the spring and brighter days. Then the spring did come. It did not come gently, but with a gluttonous roar. I suppose this should have been expected. When you wait so long for something, you tend to pounce upon it with the abandon of a starving refugee.

I lived as though death was nipping at my heels. There were times I no longer slept, I was terrified of stopping and letting the darkness catch me again. Spring moved to Summer and I ran faster and harder. This period was not marked by peace, but it was filled with brightness. I was a coma victim who was learning how to use muscles which had begun to atrophy after such a long period of uselessness. My heart was the muscle which had been still the longest. It was used to pain and learning to feel anything else was like learning to walk again.

There was a moment, a few beautiful moments, where I had everything. There were fewer moments still where I was able to have it all in my hands without shaking in terror at the fragility of it.

I suppose the way to summarize this time would be to call it freedom. Freedom is an intoxicating drug. It is, in its purest form, the absence of security. It sometimes feels like flying and more often like falling.

I teetered across a tight rope between peace and anxiety in their most potent forms. I wondered sometimes whether living in these extreme states would kill me, not that it mattered; I was in no position to stop this manic ride.

I reached the pinnacle of this mania and then, with just as little warning, it began to slow down. Some dreams began to fall and shatter around me, while others simply stood like bare branches, quietly watching their growing nakedness.

Now it is the fall and I feel the death of each leaf, bewildered at the pain of something so natural and inevitable. This is a quiet time and I am afraid. I know winter stands before me and another spring beyond that, but what truths wait for me there?

I pray that in the quiet of this season I will find clarity, that I will find peace, and that I will be able to hold onto the fire and warmth of the previous seasons. It will not be an inferno, as I have said, I’m not sure how long one can live in the face of that blaze. No, I simply hope that it will remain like a candle; gently flickering and reminding me of the warmth that lies ahead. Perhaps now in the quiet I can look back and write about that time in narrative, stringing together the fragmented bits and telling the story. Perhaps in retrospect I will begin to find words to describe the phenomenal, without rendering it mundane.