Action

Words are easy, fleeting, hearts beating and breath bleeding from our lungs.
Words have become how we connect, disconnect, reconnect, reject, perfect, project; protect.
In ink and screens, words upon words and we think we know what it all means.
Words upon words upon worlds; create the things for which our hearts are afraid to relax and unfurl.
Words to soothe the damage the world does. Words to curb the pain.
Words... because action hurts. Words because action is hard. Words because action has so often lost its worth, paired badly with the empty words. Promised action losing worth like something left to die and decay deep within the earth. Words because wonder oh wonder the very word sounds woefully weird now, words. Already, word has lost meaning here.
Words, the ink children, are my life; I live for and I am alive by words, woe the weird sound of words whispered amidst the screaming silence.

The woes of a woman who lost her best friend to suicide, crying against my side, weeping alcohol in the moonlight.

Too many growls of anger, so many crows in the manger; they push me down and rip the happiness from me like a coat hanger, leave my fractured heart bleeding, in danger.

I'm alive by ink that kept the rusted metal in my veins, by ink so kind to remind that loyalty is seen, ink that kept me from flying. Alive by ink others have bled, Ink etched into the arm of a man who once encouraged me to look ahead.
Ink in the heart of the man who lives on in the dark corners of my head. Ink like the letters he wrote me, saying I'd be better off just dead.

Alive because the scared human creature in my heart wished long to jump but she's here instead, not Andi as you first met her; with "Squalor" fresh from the pen and hate in her heart. Not Andi aching for suicide,  frayed from her hesitations and drowning without medication.

This is the writing of Andi at the late night, 2 AM half- asleep meditations, in daylight refined.

Andi of the midnight oil, the truest form of her toil.

Andi unfiltered, unclear, the closest she can get to Andrea again.

I'm tired of hurt, tired of anger; so let me try out this strange, hopeful new flavor.
I'm done waiting until the sky's clear, so if the rain falls I'll just throw my hands up and I'll dance here.
Embrace my inner demon, because from her I cannot run, with fighting her I am done.
She is me and we weep, we bleed, we let the guilt undo us, let the guilt crush us; to that heathen of guilt I bid adieu.

A brilliant mind, a star among peers, reminded me lately, of my life's first rule.
Reminded me, with words refined that have dwelt, un-uttered, unwritten,  within me, that life is more than words, verbs. Life is action; and mine has been inactive.
I have been despicable, utterly  passive.
I who admonish and demand action... laugh.

Because wonder of wonders, again words reach through the decay I have allowed to crust the vault to my soul shut and pry open the great and long immobile gate.
Again, my dysfunction shows, I cannot with action connect, but connection through word alone is but a recipe for hurt.

Yet here I write, speechless, because it is with words I connect, because action had often left me with something physical in a state of disconnect.

I know that is the past, rejected and left with hope projected, heart protected, but it's a ghost of the earth, my face pressed into the hearth, try to swallow all the hurt, but I'm left back in that wretched place, his bruises on my face, his hands down my skirt.

But I'm not here to talk again about the hurt. I'm here to look ahead, I'm here to learn, to heal, I'm here again to open up and feel. I'm here to leave the actor I lived as up onstage where she belongs.

I'm here because someone in my present was right and the man in my past was wrong.
I'm here because the sound of my voice is in my ears is again the sweetest song. Maybe it's a little vain but I cherish that I now know the strength in my voice in a sound outside of pain.

So excuse me while my lips and my lungs bleed words, that is my action.
This is that which I want seen, one of the countless sides to me.
I know this isn't the best me; the best self is what we all strive to be.
But I wasn't born to be my best self; I was born to just be me.