The Voice in the Clearing
Some mornings I want to slip the voice out like a loose tooth and bury it in the backyard.
The creative act isn’t a lightning strike. It’s a slow dance with fear, memory, and time.
There are mornings I wake up full of fear. Not of violence or death, but of the page. Of the voice curled behind my teeth, waiting for me to spit it out or swallow it whole. Of the crooked seam I keep sewing into each day and wear anyway. It feels like I’m fidgeting at the edge of my own life, hovering. Unsurrendering.
“There is no pain in my life that has not been given value by the alchemy of creative attention,” writes Melissa Febos in Body Work. And yet the act of attention, of staying, feels unbearable. I’ve been hoarding little snippets and lines, coffee grounds and off-kilter cuts, but turning toward them, really turning, requires a breaking open I’m not always brave enough to face.
