Whenthetreesspeaklatin - The Trees Speak Latin

You will be too raw for some. You will be too loud, too big, too fierce, too quiet, too deep. These are not your people.

S.C. Lourie

please please please please reblog if you’re a writer and have at some point felt like your writing is getting worse. I need to know if I’m the only one who’s struggling with these thoughts

Edgar Allan Poe, from a letter to Mrs. Maria Clemm, July 1849

I don't like to be assumed. I'd like to be known. Fully, completely. I want you to be immersed in me.

“as you get older, you realize that you’re not always right and there’s so many things you could’ve handled better, so many situations where you could’ve been kinder and all you can really do is forgive yourself and let your mistakes make you a better person.”

— Unknown

A childs imagination

I was always a daddy’s girl, even after he left.

I remember the day my mum sat me down and told me why he was gone. She didn’t go into detail-just said he couldn’t be around anymore, that it wasn’t safe for us if he stayed. My little brain couldn’t understand, but what I could understand is the fear in her eyes so I stopped asking. Instead I turned to writing. It felt like the only way I could still talk to him.

I wrote letters, simple at first. I sat on my bedroom floor, one hand under my chin and another holding a blue ink ball pen. I’d write about all the things I wish I could tell him if he was here… “dad, today I got 10/10 on my maths test at school” or “we had a Collin the Caterpillar cake for my birthday this year, it’s my favourite. I wish you were here”

I never did send them though, instead I folded them up into tiny little squares and placed them into a red box that had seashells glued on all the edges.

Every birthday he missed, every school play, every holiday where his absence felt like a cold shadow at the dinner table, I wrote. The letters stacked up like little pieces of me I hoped he’d find one day.

One night I sat there, staring at the paper, the pen trembling in my hand. This time, I didn’t write about school or my friends birthday parties or the sleepover I had with my best friend the week before. I wrote what I had been too afraid to say before. “Dad, please be nice to mum so you can come back.” I begged him in that letter like I never had before, hoping somehow that my words would reach wherever he was. I folded it up and placed it in the box that was now overflowing.

A week later he called my mum. He hadn’t done that in years, but there he was, asking about me. She didn’t tell me much, just that he asked how I was doing. It wasn’t much but in my child’s heart it felt like everything.

That’s when I became convinced I had some crazy magical powers. That I resembled the superheroes and magical witches in the shows I watched every weekend.

It just had to be true! How else could the letter I kept in my little red seashell box bring him back? I believed if I kept writing, kept wishing hard enough, praying before bed every night, that he would be able to stay this time. Maybe I was the one who could fix everything and bring my family back together! So I wrote more and more, until my favourite blue pen ran out of ink and my little box was too full of letters that I had to move them to my bedside table drawer.

But my magic wasn’t strong enough.

He left again, just like before. This time though, it hurt a little less. Maybe my magic hadn’t been enough to keep him here, but it had given me something else: strength. The kind that stopped my heart breaking completely.

The years passed, and the box was forgotten about. But I was still a daddy’s girl, even if he never came back in the way I wanted him to.

And in the quiet of my room, with the weight of that box heavy on my shelf, covered in dust, I realised something: my magic wasn’t about bringing him back. It was about learning to live without him.

People aren't homes, they never will be. People are rivers, always changing, forever flowing. They will disappear with everything you put inside them.

~ Nikita Gill

I think the first step towards the life you want is often to just say yes to more things. Accept that coffee invitation from your coworker even if it seems awkward. Sign up for that free class at the library that you're not sure you'll like. Join that club. Book that tour. Say yes to as many things as you can and kill the part of your brain that gut-reacts with a no.