Untold Words

Page after page, I saw little worth setting in stone, stories best left untold. For the most part, I felt that the words etched and scratched with either a blue ball point pen or a gently bitten cedar number two pencil, told little I cared to remember.

I grabbed hold of several pages between my thumb and index finger. I hesitated and watched the pink beneath my nail bed turn white as I pressed down with anticipation. I took a breath, not deep enough to insinuate regret, simply that of readiness. I then tore at the pages; the subsequent ones coming off easier, until many days of untold words were nothing more than crumpled pieces of dyed parchment and not a truth perhaps experienced.

It was at those crossroads of self reflection that that I decided it was best to omit the history of the journey that got me here and previously kept me at bay. It can later be said, that my act of omission was a narrative in of itself. It spoke volumes, not of my magnificence, but of less than humbly met challenges and mortal coil.

The words, although mine, told of my story, yet not the story, although of me, they didn’t speak of me. They spoke not of my struggle but of struggle, not of the fruits of my labor but of the labor of living. They were ordered in a liner fashion with beginning, middle and end, yet they only spoke of arrival.