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February 5, 2016

This is for Those Who Want to Write.

journal writing girl

This is for you, who collect words like pearls, arranging them until the light hits them just right, making them shine and shimmer.

For you who feel the deep pulse of words beneath the earth, warm and waiting. For the fear and strength it takes to do the hard, dirty work of scratching through dirt, blowing off the debris, and pulling up stories like strings.

This is for the daydreamers, the window gazers, the awkward girls and boys who’ve always dreamt up stories to lull yourselves to sleep, who were told you were too sensitive, too spacey, too ungrounded.

Too dreamy.

This is for you, who sometimes half-catches life, because you are already writing it down in your head, smoothing the edges to find a beginning, a middle, an end.

This is for you who’ve tried to be other things, but underneath it all, you know that your heart is a campfire, your mind a smouldering stream of stories that want to glow. Stories are the through line of your life, the theme you always return to, your truest home.

This is for you whose heart races when you step into a library or a bookstore, because it feels like a miracle, like iron-hot blood, all those words waiting to be touched and taken in.

This is for you whose words I haven’t yet discovered but someday will, and they will arrange themselves like jewels and make me feel something I can’t quite put into words but will try to anyways. Whose sentences bring something alive deep within me, in the part of me that is more than skin and bones and brain, in the place that was here before, the place that vibrates with truth and spark.

This is for you, the one who shows up to the blank page trembling. For the days when the laundry is sexier than the empty white space where the words should go. And for the days when the stories flow like a river, all sweeping current, all lusty liquid—so fast you’re not sure you can catch them all before they drift downstream, but you grab greedily anyways.

This is for you who wants to write, but collects excuses like small, shining stones.

Later, you whisper. When I have more time.

The time is now. The world needs your truth. They say, there is nothing new under the sun, but that is a lie.

You are new.

You are the only you beneath vast fields of stars. This is the only now we have ever had together, you and I, and I want to read your waiting words.

I want to hear about your loves and losses. I want to hear about what it feels like to be you, in your particular skin, in this particular moment.

Mostly, I want to hear your truth, your raw edges. I want to hear about your lonely heart, and your 3 AM panic, and the soft sweet moments in between. Go now, and catch those words. Get them down before they float away.

They will be shining or sludge, they will be gleaming or grainy, but they can’t be anything if you don’t first capture them.

Go and get them.

 

 

 

 

Author: Lynn Shattuck

Editor: Renée Picard

Image: Doug Robichaud at Unsplash 

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