The Life of M

I want to write until my fingers break and my wrists erode with arthritis. And when they cut off my hands up to my forearms because they’ve been broken down by my writing, I want to write with my toes.

I want to write until I’m breathless, read until I’m blind, and dream until my mind decays with old age.

I want to tell stories, wild, marvelous stories, with heroes and adventure and loyalty and courage and love and heartbreak and beautiful things like horses and mountains and forests so deep that the light through the canopy of leaves is the single most amazing shade of green you’ve never seen. 

I want my stories to read like New Orleans, so spicy and full of flavor it makes your eyes water and your nose run and your ears smoke and your cheeks flush and your eyebrows raise and your teeth chatter and your tongue tingle and your taste buds begging for more. All flash and color but mournful and sweet, like chocolate and kerosene, like violins and electric guitars.  

I have hundred of stories inside me, sitting in a small cavity on the right side of my torso, between my lungs and my heart, positioned just so that every time I take a breath and my heart pumps more blood, I remember the purpose that God gave me: to tell stories. 

I want to take these stories that I have sitting in a small cavity on the right side of my torso between my lungs and my heart and I want to unravel them. Every story is completely written but I just don’t know it yet. My task is to unravel the tangled mess and tell the story.

I want to write pages and pages of crinkled white notebook paper, stained with lines and loops and dots and markings in black ink to form words that will last much longer than my life. 

I want to hide these words. I want to write these words on a banner and hang that banner on a car and drive that car through a city and find a building in the city and climb to the top of the building and stand on the roof and scream these words until they reach every ear and soak into every brain and creep into every soul. 

But mostly I just want to have the courage to take these words that I’ve spent my whole life learning and loving and string them into the most powerful sentences, saying and meaning the things that no one else in the world has the courage or the strength to say or mean: I love you. We will fight. You are beautiful. Believe. Broken or beaten, it makes no difference. Stay. Have courage.