...the nerve...

        I remember a time when a blank page was all I needed to set myself free.  Words and scribbles and scrawls would flow out.  Curlicue trees or wisps of fire filling the margins when the words got stuck in traffic.  But soon enough, no matter the clutter in my mind, that page would be full to overflowing and I would feel the relief of having written it out.  

        

        I find myself wondering, as I sit in front of a blank screen if that's part of the problem.  Screen substituted for page.  Keyboard tapping instead of ball point scrawling.  Not a free form margin to be found to keep the fingers active while the mind puzzles out the language barrier between heart and soul. 

        For a while there, my writing was confined to the tangible page...my words stuck between the covers of a journal.  It seems, when I look back through the post scroll here, that I jump track frequently and let this blog sit, empty, when there's too much to clean up or organize or pack away...emotionally.   I, as the writer, have the benefit of being able to bounce back and forth between blog and journal to see that my timeline is uninterrupted.  But here on the screen, the seasons of my discontent play out in huge gaps of empty space...empty days~weeks~months...when nothing finds its way to this space.  

        I think there are apology posts.  I don't feel like opening up another window to scroll through and check.  But I think they are there, one or two at least.  The "hey, I'm still here....checking back in" words of someone who feels guilty and neglectful at having taken the time to deal with things in her own time, in her own way.

        This morning I woke up in a mood, a distinctive mood...a dream not quite run its course before my eyes opened.  I woke  up wondering when and how and where I had lost so much of myself.  

        I used to sing.
        I used to dance.
        I used to act.
     
        I used to move through my days in music and passion and creativity.  No matter the weather, my home sparkled inside with song, the music filling up the vacant corners where the things that should have been...weren't.  Music filled the empty space and made of our impoverished means, a substantial existence.  The walls were covered in art, and photos of things that caught my eye.  My son's early paintings from school competing for space with thrifted textiles and postcards from abroad.  I liked the quirk of it all.  The chaos.  The constant flow of energy that all that colour and texture created.  And through that space I danced.  My legs stretching to an arabesque in the kitchen or pirouetting the plates to the table, much to my then-toddler's delight.  Life was...something to enhance.   A show where the presentation mattered more than the substance.  Where the music and dance and drama made more of what little we had and we felt rich, indeed.

        I woke up this morning in a mood and felt my legs stretch out, my toes flexing out to twinkle.  I sat up and stood, shoulders rolling back...neck stretching side to side and pinging in pain...and rose to demi-pointe.  Felt the burn in my arches as they curved and froze, locked in a position short of the flexibility they once had.   Felt the quiver in my calves as long-sleeping muscles tried to spring back.  Felt the crack in ankle as rusty joints gave way.

        Felt, in that moment too, the disappointment and disgust of an aging body that hasn't been "kept up" and the sudden, firm resolve to "set things right".

        So I got up, fully.  Grabbed my robe and flicked off the a.c.  Marched into the kitchen to set the pitcher to boil and prepped our mugs.  I stretched in the kitchen as well, arching my back and feeling the little pops of tension, suddenly angry and not just annoyed at how stiff and tense I am.  Frustrated to feel the solid wall of restricted movement.  Feeling like the Tin Man, in need of a good oiling.  And knowing, full well, that so much of what's lost to time is gone forever.  That inevitable depressor on all good intentions of knowing that they aren't wholly-fully-totally achievable.  Knowing that my body will never spring back the way it did at 20.  Never contort as it could at 30.

        But I shook it off.  Made the coffee, letting my body sway to the music in my head as I puttered about the kitchen and waited for my son to wake.  Turning the music on when he finally stirred and reminding him, with a smile, that we used to always have music in the mornings.  He just nodded his assent...an acknowledgement of "Yes...that's how it was...and how it should be again" and grabbed for his mug.

         And I thought, in that moment, all's well that begins well.

         I thought, as he slunk back to the livingroom with his coffee and his book and his blanket, that I had hit the reset button.  That I had activated a "fresh start" of sorts.

        I thought I was me again.  The "used to" me...that sang and danced and acted and created and for whom a new day was the blank page for a new adventure.

        I thought I'd had a breakthrough.

        Until I sat down with my second cup of coffee and I put my headphones on and clicked through the screen saver to the blank page where the cursor blinked my creativity into oblivion and I sat, counting the seconds along with that cursor...1....2....blink....4....

       All the words turn into dust.  A mess of thoughts and emotions that can't possibly be sorted through.  Just...leftovers...refuse....garbage to be tidied up and disposed of.

        Is it really the creativity that's missing now?  Or is it maybe, just maybe, the recklessness?  The bravado of youth.  The carelessness that allows for free-flowing thought.  Is it my creativity that has been suffocated, or my nerve?

        I think now, again, of the music and the night last week when I shoved all the furniture back to the walls and let it burn through me.  Of the fiery energy that took hold and of the way the whole of me sparked and sparkled as my barriers came down and the music and the movement blasted right through all the responsibility~logic rigidity that holds me together.  I think of that night and I want it back.  I want that feeling and that freedom and that fulfillment.

        I want to shrug off the mantle of everything everyone seems to think I should be and just be me.  I want my son to know me...the me that I was and still am...the me that is drowning under the waves made of not wanting to make waves.   Its as though I'm drowning in reverse.  My body safe and dry and going about the business of being all that I'm supposed to be while only my eyes are below the surface, endlessly gazing at all I used to be.
     
        And there she is.  There I am.  The me of 16 and 20 and 21 and 24.  The student and the explorer and the new-wife and the new-mother.  There she is again.  The girl and the woman who danced through her days and sang out her feelings.   The "animated conversationalist" in the spotlight of a high-school dinner, when a friend loudly declared just that....pointing right at her, as she tried to melt into the floor.

        There she is.  In her 20s.  Spinning out inside her head, desperately trying to stay above water as her marriage implodes and her life...thoughtfully planned and carefully wished...blinks right out of existence.  There she is.  Bruised and battered and broken.  Silent and still.  Not daring to make a noise or jostle the delicate balance for fear that more bad things will find her.

        There she is.  Wholly immersed in motherhood.  Going through the motions on everyone else's behalf.  The employee.  The chaperone.  The advocate.  Fueled by the needs of others.  Ignoring her own.  There she is, that woman in her 30s.

        There she is.
        But where am I?

        Right here.  I found myself.  Right here, under the surface.  These two eyes that can see through all the form and function and formality.  These eyes that focus on the way the notes dance across the staff and the way the feet bend and flex.  These eyes that see all the words that were, and all the words still stuck inside.

        And I blink.  1....2...blink...4....  I blink along with the cursor.  Trying to clear my field of vision.  I bend and twist and stretch in my chair, feeling the sharp twinges of pain as stiff joints and lax muscles try to obey me.   I hear the click of my fingers on the keyboard and wonder what's flowing out onto the screen.  I'm curious to read it now...to see what makeshift sentences my brain constructed while I was listening to the music....

~Leanna