The Day I Stopped Writing for 11 Years Was the Day a Part of Me Went to Sleep.

Describing a moment in time when something had to rest before I could come back to being an expressive human again.

The following story was written about a year ago and describes an event that took place eleven years prior. At the time, I had one young baby(exhausting); both parents were adjusting to the change in identity. We(the man and I) fought, and I shut down a part of my life I probably shouldn’t have.

It was a dark day full of rain; the baby would come any day now. Or perhaps the baby was asleep; perhaps I was sleeping? I don’t remember now because anytime a baby is born, the time several months forward and back has a curious elastic feeling: Memory cannot be trusted as to which moment happened when.

Anyways, I was alone again, with only the fact that everyone leaves me alone at the end, even you. Somehow that fact had grown from a stone the size of a thimble I held in my hand to a mountain looming over my inner country.

So I did what I always did: I wrote.

I took my little pen and flimsy paper and hiked to the bottom of the mountain. I looked up and sighed, but I knew what had to be done: I made little origami wheelbarrows and dug into the mountain with my words. Slowly I filled up with the dust and dirt. I sifted through it to find the flecks of gold. The thoughts I would gild on fresh paper to show you.

The Sun did set. It got darker; perhaps the baby woke again and began to cry. I was still in your mother's garage that we had painted purple with a queen bed with two mattresses on it.

You came home then, too many hours since I had last spoken to you. My eyes were red, and my nerves were fried for irrational worry that you’d be dead in a gutter. The baby had stopped her crying. I gave you my letter as the tears fell. I even managed to speak the words that you had hurt me.

You didn't read it, you put it aside, unopened. You swayed on your feet a whole head above me: from exhaustion, from me, or the pub. By that point, who could make out the difference?

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