Her fragile heart leaked into her muscle fibers.

She felt the bones in her jaw store her collected, unsaid words.

The raw space in the hollow of her clavicles housed disappointment she didn’t want to acknowledge, and, sometimes, she felt the reverberating of words that she tried to stuff and cram back down long after they had exploded onto the pages of her life.

She generally wore her exposed and beating red heart outside her body, but, often, it was too tender, so she caged it up for awhile behind careful guardedness and playful laughter.

The narrow edge of her right hand glides along the thin, lined notebook.

She poures herself into her written words because, though completely exposed, she feels the cushion of pen and ink and air; where the harshness of reality slips loosely between punched holes at the notebook’s ringed binding; puddling onto the nicked, hardwood table that grazes her breasts as she hunches over her work.

And somewhere in her, an aching loneliness is quenched and soothed by this outpouring of letters and punctuation.

She pauses, sips coffee and returns to the unfair speed of her fertile mind and pumping, fragile heart, and she regains strength from the fortifying and comforting elixir of many writers before her—her coffee mug reads “Rise and Shine”—and, more, from the releasing of the space between her clavicles.

Because as she oozes out and onto the neatly lined page, she feels a shift in the muscles of her throat. She notices, too, a loosening in her head that’s not from caffeine.

She feels free. 

Long ago she heard that the truth shall set her free and, while she finds this to not always be the case, she knows devotedly that owning and baring her honest human heart—however tender and fragile it may be—is the sole path to both joy and ease.

More, she knows that she writes because she must, to breathe.

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Editor: Renée Picard

Photo: Author’s own