Words are my hermitage
Words carry me away from remembering the dark, from feeling the weight of sorrow my skin remembers, can pull me into a story, a country of someone else’s heart if I open to where the bookmark is and my eyes move across the page. The page is my safe place. My eyes focus, locate characters names and places in the novel, the words catch me and I breathe evenly again.
When remembering pulls me into the blackness where knowing is forgotten I gasp for breath. There are times my mind slows into “no thought” and I am clear. Sometimes remembering is like it the radiance of thirty butterflies and their whispering wings like yellow laughter. Then the dark place emerges from within me and I am lost again as I struggle and my hand reaches for a book and I find comfort in the shapes of the letters themselves, even before I see them as words, the simple shapes of letters leading me to words.
There are times the drug heavy danger of depression is so ringed with longing and heart lost, rocking me into despair’s undertow, lost in a funnel of thoughts, beckoning me to a place that feels like a kind of madness then words release pictures, colors, rhythm, releasing me from those shadows.
Words are my hermitage.