Intentions

There are days when I sit down in front of my notebook, full of intentions. I look at the thinned-out black horizons that separate the sunrises and sunsets of the words that could see morning or never step out of the shadows. The broken railroad tracks over words underserving. Undeserving of who, I don't know. Maybe my future self? The same girl who wants to believe in the good of everything except her own fortune and ability.

It's hard to swallow that my biggest fear is a few moments from where I am now. That I'll wake up and set fire to who I was  before I put my head to my pillow. Sometimes I can't stand finding myself splattered across a page, pathetically claiming to have felt things and been a part of something that will periodically crawl back into the bottom of the kettle and ignite the next time I'm shown the slightest bit of heat.

The sound of ballpoint turning into the ticking of the extended arm of an analogue race.
A word.
Words.
An underground stream of dirtied sentences.
They show up sometimes without digging, sometimes only after finding the roots of century-old trees wrapped around my neck.

I hate words. I can't live without them. I hate words but if you asked me where I was from, I'd dive into worlds made up of previously scribbled tales from when I was scared, when I thought I had found love, how I had burned myself so many times before and how I'd imagined my future to be something everyone would read about.

Truth is, I read my own writing in song form but still find them unworthy of a harmony. Maybe all we are is a sad song, subjectively made positive by the five year old girl whose joy is found in licking the gaps between her fingers after eating ice cream without a spoon. That girl used to be you and maybe she used to be me, only now we couldn't bear being caught with our tongues out. And I can't bear the thought of writing another word.

Because I hate words. I hate words but I can't stop writing them. I look at my pen and I see myself edging towards you the way the ink makes its way to the page end. You're my punctuation; the comma in my breathing, the ellipsis in my hesitation to touch your hand. I could do with a world without fullstops but I think I'd miss the moments just before you've decided what words to say, the words you hope won't hurt me, but the words that are as inevitable as the fullstop that follows them.

Sometimes I sit down in front of my notebook, full of intentions. "This time I won't write about her," and sometimes I'll make it halfway to the bottom having kept my promise. But you're there, pole dancing around my 'L's and falling over my 'I's and you're racing my pen to the end of the page.

You don't have to run. We both know you'll win.