Fifty-Five

For a long time, I was a storyteller without a voice. I buried myself in other people’s words, so I didn’t have to listen to the ones haunting me. I would sit down at my computer, or with a pen and paper, and stare at the blank page, giving up in frustration. I couldn’t start; before words even made it to the page, I would question them, edit them, try to shape them into something they didn’t want to be. This went on for years, and I think I suffered for it.

All those ghosts, all those stories never told.

So finally, after a lot of thought, I started this blog. Originally, it was a challenge for myself: write something, anything, and post every day for 30 days. I needed something outside of me to hold myself accountable. Something that could become a routine, where I would feel off, wrong, if I didn’t log in, if I didn’t write or proofread or post.

Some days were easy, and the stories just presented themselves, flowing out of me in one burst. Other times, I had to pull each word from my brain, slowly, painfully. Some days, I wrote short poetry, just to have something. Some days I didn’t even write, but posted a piece I had written in the past. But I did it. Every day, for 30 days.

And then something surprising happened. I realized it had become a habit. I kept going. I watched as the number of posts kept going up, up, up. I started mid-January, but as of yesterday, I posted every day for a whole month, in February.

I started this blog with hope, but not optimism, that I would be able to post 30 days in a row.

This, today, is my 55th post. It might not be much in the scope of a year, or a decade, or a lifetime, but for now, I am going to savor this milestone I didn’t think I’d reach.

© The Lightning Tower, 2020

Daydreams

She lay on the cool green grass, feeling the leftover morning dew soak into her back. She didn’t care; it was a beautiful spring day, she could taste summer on the air, and the clouds above her whisked across the sky like they were late for a meeting. She wondered, absently, what the clouds might feel like, what they might taste like. Would they be like this spring morning, cool and refreshing? Or maybe they were like cotton candy, spun sugar that danced across the sky.

She giggled at the thought. She knew the clouds were just water gathering high above them before showering down on her little planet. But still, what if… She reached her hand up, tracing the puffy white clouds. What if, she thought, we could just reach up, into the sky, and pull down the clouds ourselves? Would they hold their form, and stay clean and bright and airy, or would they dissolve into droplets on the way down?

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