Make & Mash

I feel as though all of the writers I know and don’t know are standing there, chanting my name, encouraging me to put these words down on paper. I hear their cries and I clutch their hands and I see their grinning faces. As one collective body, they edge me onwards, seductively daring me to be creepy, experiment with cocaine, learn to french-braid, meditate beneath a willow tree. I swallow saliva and metallic fills my mouth. Am I ready? They don’t care. As my toes curl against the lip of the bridge, they say flying feeds the aching soul: my momentary suspension in time and space clears my conscience and I am delighted by the darkness. My dwindling belly reminds me of the importance of literature. Creatively engaged, I let sadness and unwashed hair spew horrible poetry. I let the smell of apricots and texture of Grandma’s yarn stimulate affirmative prose. I can’t tell if desire or desperation urges me to continue creating. Art, whether it belongs to Frida Kahlo or the woman across the street you suspect is a witch or the toddler you babysit, has the tendency to blur definitive lines. Overlaps, softening, fog. Out of this seemingly indistinct shape that creativity produces, a sense of wholeness washes over me. I am full of its purpose to ignite activity and to demonstrate. I am full of an intensified awareness that integration among the wildest and most practical of individuals, the movement and reception of messages, works to establish an expansive communicative spiderweb necessary for sustaining human life. Like creators before me, I relish in words and I believe in their power. I believe in images, installations, and sculpture. I believe in carrot seeds. I feel Virginia Woolf circulating through my veins.