A blank page.
Filling up the room.
Filling up my eyes, my thoughts, my fingertips.
A clean slate.
Ever try and clean an actual slate? You always see what was on it before.
You're right.

Somebody wiped me clean.
Took my words away.
But they remain. They show through.
They are beneath my skin, moving, swirling,
Letters and symbols and words all running like ink veins beneath translucent flesh.


I am a blank page, filling up the room, filled with what I never said.
What I couldn't say.
It beats like a drum behind my eyes, across my thoughts, inside my fingertips.
It tells me, Go. It says, Be first. Be strong for the first time in your life. Be strong without something to force you.
I tell it to be quiet, and it pounds within me like it's locked inside and the air's run out.
It pounds at the edges of me as if I  put the doors there and locked them.
I didn't.

I imagine that if you were to look at me and really see me, every word would run along my face like water, like tears,
Crawling across my collarbones, twisting round my wrists,
Black ink veins, pulsing.
Pounding.

Because isn't that what we all want?
To be the one who leaves, if it means we won't get left?
Isn't that always easier?
To leave the old behind to rot in the same place, frozen like a photograph, and find somewhere new and exciting to forget them?

I do not forget. My memories are like tattoos.
They flow along my sharp cheekbones, the crooks of my arms, the insides of my thighs.
Words.
Black and accusing.
Black and permanent.
I am a newspaper soaked in rainwater, the words bleeding through the thinness of the flimsy page.
I am a blank paper, but not really.
I only wish I was.
It is the first time I can remember when I have not been in pain, but have still wished for relief.
It is the first time, outside the madness of grief and anguish, that I have knowingly and truly wished to be...blank.
To be wiped clean.
To be white and new and unmarred again.
To remain that way.
To touch nothing, and be touched by nothing.

Today I felt the water rise cold and clear to my waist, and my mind was empty.
The next moment, the next breath, that was all I needed to know.
And in that I realized how deeply I wish to turn off my thoughts.
How truly tired I am of living with print running along my body.
How I wish that every moment I wasn't stamped by my emotions, marked, owned, crushed as if by an old heavy printing press.
Today for a moment I was cured of a disease with which I have lived my entire life, and so not known I had;

Thought.

How I wish to think of nothing, to FEEL nothing but the moment.
For they are the same,
There is no separation of mind and heart, although they seem to clash.
My mind feels and my heart thinks, and they both descend upon me constantly with demands and criticisms,
The red pen to my black ink story.

Once I tried to do my own editing,
But I'm afraid I only made a mess,
Red ink ran down the drain and,
Quick as a lightning strike and twice as terrible,
So did everything I loved.

I never want to be a soaked newspaper in the gutter, rain pouring down and tearing the pages, too cheap to pick up and throw out properly.
I never want to be that again.

And so I decided to leave the red pen to my inner editor.
And yet it hurts more, the sting of knowing that I am merely a vehicle for a printed story.
I may have a say about the wording, the artistry, the format,
But I have no power over content,
And no way to keep the page clean.

A blank page, I used to say,
An opportunity.
And now I wonder if maybe it wasn't.
If maybe a clean page is not an invitation.
If perhaps instead of a chance, an empty page is a plea:

"Don't."