Edema Rue

Hello, Foolish Child,

Hello, Forgotten One,

Hello, Weary Traveler,

Hello, Throbbing Heart,

Hello. Welcome home.

You look tired, child.

Are you tired, child?

You seem lost, child.

Are you lost, child?

Come inside, child.

Oh, Foolish Child, your heart.

It aches, 

does it not?

It throbs,

My poor child.

Your heart whirls,

Your heart changes,

Your heart wishes,

Your heart groans,

Your heart sobs.

Come rest, precious child.

Come sleep, beloved.

Come to me.

Come to safety.

Come to home.

Your heart, it aches.

I will teach it peace.

I will teach it calm.

I will give you sleep.

I will give you rest.

—

Ah, Foolish Child

Ah, Forgotten One

Ah, Weary Traveler. 

Ah, Empty Heart.

Ah. Thank you.

Foolish, foolish child.

There is no peace

In life.

There is no rest

For the living.

You gave me your strength.

You gave me your hope.

You gave me your blood

Flesh

And bones.

Thank you, Stranger.

You should not

Have trusted

So easily.

Goodbye, foolish child.

Thank you for the meal.

How, in 3 minutes, do you give a crowd of strangers a piece of your soul and make them understand it? 

What story do you give them? Something hopeful? Something sharp and painful? It’s a heady feeling, exhilarating, knowing that you are completely in control. But make just one mistake,  and your tale will skip over rather than sinking in, leaving your audience unaffected. So there is a growing pressure, too, one that comes with knowing how easy it is to fail.

I don’t want to fail. I want to write the words that stick around. I want to build worlds of metaphors and people of myself. I want to ride through life on a wave of success, with tough enough skin to only get stronger from the failure. I want to write. When life reaches its claws into my heart, I want the freedom to escape into the pictures that are my paragraphs and the worlds that are my words. We write! We find power in the letters strung into words formed into sentences twisted into stories all our own.  

A carefully constructed story has the potential to change a life. Put your words together with enough care and you will create a home for thousands of readers, a path to freedom for dreamers trapped on this mundane world of lonely science. Build villains of your greed and heroes of your wishes. Twist art into stories. Layer stories into epic sagas. Fight dragons and trick demons. End wars and spark revolutions. Fall in love with an angel. Live a thousand lives that are impossible on Earth.

That is the power of writing.

At least, it is to us. We understand the words, understand the way they can take us home. But the stories we value so highly have been taken and changed and twisted out of shape. The precious words that fill our souls with love and terror and pain have suddenly been subdued, used to describe the most mundane scenes. 

‘Traitor’, ‘coward’, ‘monster’. ‘Hero’, ‘warrior’, ‘strong’. These are words that could change a heart, words that could change the world, once. Now, they are but letters strung together. Instead of being too sharp to be used commonly, they are too dull to cut in even the most extreme situations. And when we truly need these words, they’re wasting away. Losing their shine, their luster, the things they might have been, the things they once were. 

But not to us, and that’s what it is to be a writer, isn’t it? To accept that the world may never truly understand your work, and to accept that that’s okay, because you’ve gotten what you wanted from it; a home. A place of peace. A place away from this world, away from the cheers and the scoffs. And that’s all we really need, because we’re writers. 

And storm it all, we’re going to write.