Heartbreaking Quiet

Well, it's been awhile since I've posted. Again. I feel like every time I post on here, I'm apologizing for that. But I've been hard at work writing book-shaped things, so I've chosen to let this blog thing fall by the wayside.

I've gone back and forth on whether I should even keep it at all. The thing is, I always sort of envisioned this as a writing advice blog. But, I find I'm always struggling to come up with things to talk about. And who am I to give you advice, anyway?

I'm one of those people who *always* thinks before they speak, and frequently talks themselves out of saying anything at all. Classic INTJ, I know. But there are things I WANT to talk about. Important things, things rooted deep within my heart. But in the end, I won't have any real answers. And I honestly don't feel qualified to pretend to. So I've decided to express myself in another way.

I'm constantly jotting down poems and doodling in notebooks (habit from my days as a teenage cliche, I suppose) so I'm going to use this space to share those things with you. Starting now. Hope you enjoy!

Heartbreaking Quiet

In the silence of night

It aches

Like a bruise

Tiny hearts bursting

Stars beneath your skin

A shuddering sigh

Shadows cup the raw pulp of something warm

Something beating

Whispering dark, quiet things

Lonely things

Ramparts to your strength

Words are sand to your dry mouth

And silence plump dewdrops cradled

In the folds of a flower

They warn you

Yours is a half-formed wisdom

So moor it to your forsaken place

The graveyard for all your maiden ships

These wilds

They never taught you to remember

They leave you in the rushes

Flayed and swollen

From when they reached inside to touch it

But they’ll never touch it

Because they don’t understand what they feel

The tadpole cocooned inside a web

All you wanted was to fly

The Season

Well... Halloween’s over. Not sure about you guys, but we take that holiday very seriously in my house. Maybe it has something to do with my deep-rooted love for costumes… maybe. I might have been the kid that wore her cowboy costume to school on a day that wasn’t Halloween. Dead winter, in fact. I remember because it was a pain in the butt to trade those chaps in for snow pants at recess. But that brings me to my next point. Now begins The Season.

I can now absentmindedly hum Christmas carols at work without sounding like a complete premature nincompoop. I still can’t sing them mindedly until after Thanksgiving, but that’s alright. Only three weeks.

I’ll be honest though. I got in the holiday spirit a little early this year. At work, we were sent one of those catalogs full of Christmas card options. I flipped through it one day on my lunch hour and there was this one picture that jumped out at me. It’s probably the most cliché scene ever. One of those Thomas Kinkaid types, with a snowy farmhouse at sunset and sleigh rides. But it wasn’t really the scene that got me. It was the sunset. The orange glow setting below the silhouetted snow-covered trees. It reminded me of winter nights at my dad’s house, sitting on the vent, trying to get warm and looking out his large back windows at the sunset. We didn’t own a farm house or have sleigh rides pass our front door. But that was my sunset.

Have you ever stumbled on something cliché that even though you knew it was cliché, it made you a little nostalgic? What makes a cliché personal? Is it your own experiences, or is it something in its delivery?