The Bleeding Pen

When I found no one to talk to—to share my grief and sorrows with—it was my confidant. I’d find it there, resting by the wayside, and it would come to me. On days and nights when I felt emotionally withdrawn, forced to swallow a sea of words down my throat, it’d pierce my neck to let it flow and find release once spilled; like a cystic mass of congealed emotional pus, the heavy heart would weep onto the pages from the pen I held between my fingers.

With this pen, I felt, I could muster the might to grip the reins of the unruly steed of my personal destiny, changing the tides with every stroke, line, or crease on the page as I bled for hours until the basin had run dry and depleted. Once, I thought of you more as a mere tool, an instrument to perform a deed asked of me. Do lumbermen look upon the axes by which they fell forests by the verdant many and think of their inherent value? Perhaps it is nothing but a tool to them; yet, nevertheless, one that serves as an extension of themselves and their purpose, essence, as fellers of trees and clearer of the woods.

Much in the same way, I looked upon this pen I held steady in my hand once with such indifference; nothing more and nothing less was it an instrument to perform the tasks it was made to do. Yet, as the days passed by, with every new poem, story, or bleeding page I gave forth, its weight in my grasp grew heavier. Almost as if its weight corresponded to reflect the sheer gravity it now commanded, guided by each new page given life, by every story whose worlds it gave form until my palms would grow fatigued and I’d set it down—relieved to have rid myself of the words I could never say.

This pen is now more than just a mere tool to me. It is now my saving companion, my most lurid reflection, and the conduit by which I channel my very truths once veiled behind layers of hesitance and inhibitive facades.

I write; therefore, I am.