A Writer's Diary - Part 5: The Text About Feelings

So many things wanting out. All at the same time. It was a long time since the time when she felt time slow and become endless time.

It was a long time, since so many things had wanted out at once - and found a way.

She tried not to stop. Her mind was a vortex and her fingers a blur; she was a willow and a fire and a gale and a monster.

She was a girl. She was a woman. She was a girl again, and her fingers hesitated; then, she was a woman again; a wild, feral, raging, all-consuming goddess, out to destroy the world, or heal it.

It all depended.

Now, she was a sea; still, deep and blue; fathomless blue, and fathomless deep; then a wind broke, and she was a crashing tide; then a gale broke, and she was a maelstrom; then an itty bitty shell floated down her middle, and she was a girl again; eyes saucer-wide with wonder and curiosity, and the tide stilled once more.

She picked up the shell and studied it. Tilted it sideways and edgeways, feeling the pearly smooth white with her eyes; tasting the salt with her nose; licking the time off it’s surface.

It was, she decided, a very old shell indeed. A pearl and a fish had had a baby, and this shell was it. It was a marvel of life, of age, of beauty - and she envied it.

She envied it’s indisputability; in being a shell; in being a marvel; in being ageless and everlasting at the same time, and at being so inconceivably small.

How could a thing be so small, and so full of power at once, that the mere look of it made her want to cry? How could such a fragile thing hold such will?

But it didn’t, she realized. A dead thing held no will. But it held the marvel she gave it, an that was a great power indeed.

When she looked at it, she saw endlessness and greatness, and thus, so the thing became.

She decided then, to take the power for her own, and consume it the way she had given it away. But when she held it close to her eyes, and readied her mind and body for the power that were to fill her - nothing came.

And she realized, that while she could give such power away, she could not hold it for herself. For if the will was in the eye of the beholder - then her will was nothing but howling winds and windborne sands. Because in her own eyes, she held nothing but a tiny shell, a dead thing mightier than her - because she had made it so. In her own eyes, she was withered and bleak; a drying straw on a yellowing field; a bird with a broken wing coming in for a crash-landing; a wolf exiled from it’s pack and left to die -

It was a long time indeed since all that wanted out had found an out such as this.

Her fingers stopped, and she marveled at it for a moment.

How could a girl be a woman within a girl within a woman. And how could a woman help the girl become a woman, when the woman was only half woman, and half girl?

It was a mystery, she decided. Then smiled.

She liked mysteries.

She wrote on.