You'll have to forgive me if I'm more lyrical than usual, but I have just returned from the most incredible slam poetry event and now words are swirling around my head demanding to be written. Sometimes starting these posts is clunky, unsure sentences not yet fully formed, but today electricity bursts out of my brain and through my fingertips, pulsing and pressing each key to form the phrase to communicate to you what I'm trying to say.
I could never do spoken word. In front of a crowd I stop breathing, and I mean that in the literal sense. The words don't come out because breaths can't come in and there's a finite amount of time that one can go without oxygen. It's certainly shorter than any speech, poem or rhyme will ever be, and who wants to hear from the girl gasping at the front?
I can write, though. Of course many people can, but when I say I can write I mean I can write feelings. I express myself through this screen, or through my notes, or even through the scrawled scribbles in the millions of notebooks scattered around homes on different continents. It wasn't always this way: I never kept a diary for more than three days straight, and sure I could put pen to paper academically but I was only one for prose and nothing that even vaguely bordered poetic. But the words that I read from my favourite writers entered my heart as I clasped their well-loved novels between my excited hands. I started to jot down on here boring sentences about my days in Paris and before long I was practising writing; writing for myself. I even tried my hand at poetry and only one worked, verses that felt like I was exposing my raw soul through sentences. Through regular practise I started to pick up a flow, and there are old posts I read where I can still feel the rhythm coursing through my body as they wrote themselves. My hands were doing the work, but it felt like those words poured out of my brain fully formed with little input from me. Would it amaze you to know that sometimes I don't even know how I feel until I write about it?
There is no point to this post other than to express how inspired I feel right now. Posts of late have become a little more clunky, a throwback to a younger me who didn't know she could write but wanted to try anyway. I hope you see what I mean, or perhaps you are shaking your head and thinking that I am no different. But tonight I feel different, I feel lit up in a way that only comes from seeing the inspirational work of others. Words communicated so beautifully that I swallowed back tears more than once. Maybe I will never perform, but I want to write in a way that sends that rhythm to your heart. I've seen it done, and maybe even done it before. Will you permit me to keep trying?
