She tries to write beautifully on purpose; wants to impress her, challenge him, be an artist. She tries to make the words sound right, realizing only too late that focus on vocabulary turns the reader away from the content.
She sits down one day, closes her eyes and lets the pen sprawl across the page; sentences, phrases and ideas forming before she has time to edit them in her head. What emerges on the paper is a story of love she has never told, a past she has hidden and a future she is afraid of. She can’t piece anything together but she tries, playing with the sentences until they make sense. They aren’t beautiful after that.
The scratched on piece of paper emerges from her bag, crumpled and dirty, and she reads through it from beginning to end, seeing the story in it that she missed the first time. It tells the story of the men and women she has loved, the pain she has experienced and the unexpected things to come. She tapes it to her wall, watching the sentences come to life as she experiences each day. Each day is an experience; each experience a sentence.
The phrases spill off the paper and on to her walls, covering the concrete structure she hid behind with the reasons she can no longer be so afraid.
It dawns on her one day that the writing she was trying to make beautiful already was, she just needed to let Life do a little writing for her.
