returning

For all of my life that I can remember I have felt the recurring sense that there is no way for me to ever share myself with others. If my mother is reading this, she'll maybe understand that this is me talking finally about something having to do with the last three months of me not talking to her, or my dad, but mostly her.

I don't know when I started writing poetry. But it steamed up from the sewage canals under the streets, it was a try at telling about myself what I felt I had not told or could not tell.

There are no secrets that can be remembered and then shared and released into the wind like doves. I release doves from cages every week at least, only to feel that the outside world is only the bigger more encompassing cage for them.

I went to Mosul and plenty of things ended. I wrote some poems there. I felt like I had buried my heart in a few of the poems that I wrote there. In the place where I was further from anyone than I had ever been, no one on the other side of the world seemed to think anything of those poems.

I lost some faith during that year and I've not written very much since. Lately, I've noticed myself wandering back to a few things though. I read a few pages of the Bible a couple weeks ago. I traveled to Seattle, which is not so far from the Northwest I grew up in. I've begun to feel an allure from the great works of literature on my bookshelf. And finally, I've begun to try and write again.

I do not know where the resounding conviction in me comes from that I will never be heard. I doubt if writing anything will change that, no matter who it resonates with or how deeply.

I do not know how to have my thoughts to myself, and feel as though having them without someone else having them with me is enough.

I think there are some stories I would like to tell, though. Stories that have to do with me having seen things and felt things that I can never give to another person as definitely as I possess them. Stories about how I am being brought slowly to a place where those sights and feelings mean something even if I'm the only one that gets to understand. That final place is the place that I now think of as home. The home I left even before I was old enough to travel.

I would like to return to telling stories now, when and as I can.