The Door Girl, Part 29

The words in my head, the voices, they were quiet at first. They blew through my mind like tumbleweeds on an almost windless night. They didn’t disrupt things.

        But then they grew louder and larger and started to damage my soul.

        They had to be given life, and by life, I mean voice. And that is why I write.

        Because the voices never die. Writing is a lonely profession, but the inside of a writer’s mind is filled with the most vivid colors, people with a million stories unto themselves; it’s the playground that never sleeps.

        But God, sometimes, I wish it would. This is what I was talking about earlier—the haunting and begging for attention, waking me in the middle of the night like a small child for a drink of water. The words are restless, and so I am restless.

        I breathe. Listen. And let you drink this healing balm from my aching hands.

The Door Girl, Part 28

Words are like flowers; when you put them together properly, you can create a work of art.

        I used them to escape the jail I had created for myself. I used them like a dying man pushes his morphine button. They were my escape—my pain killers, and I used them in large quantities.

        Bleeding to death by ink is a fantastic thing. The pain, the fear, the voices and the shadows where they lurk--it all gets washed away with a  pen in my hand.

        It was difficult to write on anything at the mental hospital because writing utensils were seen as weapons (again, understandable). So they gave me short, stubby pencils like you use at the library. But I took it anyway because it calmed me more than the Ativan I begged for.

        I wrote my way to crazy. And that is to say, I wrote my way to sanity. Yes, restored mental health. Which fully includes the crazy and the ugly. Those are the parts that make us beautiful and evolve in to more lovely human beings.

        I wrote until I realized that life is never as black and white as it looks on paper, even though I had hand-crafted every detail. For the first time, I realized that I was in control of everything and nothing. I was invincible with all the fragility of a flower.