I close my eyes. I am the visionary, the one-eyed seer, the storyteller. I am Pen. I can fight with the power of images and words.
You have to imagine things before you can do them. Stories help us see.
It’s scary to feel this much in such a dangerous world. Even if what you feel, overwhelmingly, like inhaling the precious, still-surviving existing earth, is not fear but love.
This way she could feel the rush of warm air, blowing back her hair as if she were a plant. She could go out into the night and become a part of it and forget who she was.
Spun sugar clouds and extraterrestrial crystal vintage T-birds flying through space, morning-glory girls swinging from star-hung vines in cosmic gardens.
We are all insane. But how do you distinguish sanity from insanity, how do you diagnose abnormality in this new world?
If we don’t write our stories, how will we truly know who we are? How will we define the world? How will we touch the mysteries of life?
Sometimes you fall, spinning through space, grasping for the things that keep you on this earth. Sometimes you catch them.
My breath clouded the air like a little ghost escaping from my body.
Take my eye,” I say. “I have another.
I am not a hero, I am not Odysseus, there are no gods or goddesses guiding me. All I have is myself. And Hex’s sword.
So the spell was broken and she ran home through a tangle of words where the letters jumbled and made no sense and meant nothing, and the words were ugly and she was not to be heard or seen, she was blemished and too fat, too thin, not smart, too smart, not beautiful, not a woman not not not. All the things that girls feel they are not when they fear that if they become, if they are, they will no longer be loved by the sisters whose hearts they have not meant to break.
I climb through the rubble toward the door. It takes a long time, time enough for a Giant to see me from the blood-red stained-glass eye window and reach out to crush me in his hand the size of a tractor.
Writing was my religion, my foremost purpose in life, my consolation. But as the years passed and I didn’t have the successes that others deemed the qualifications of a “real” writer, I went into hiding. I wrote, but I lost the strength of my words. I wrote, but with a doubt that needled each sentence, a lack of self-confidence that clouded my imagination. My boldness evaporated. My verve started to become a distant memory. I lost my truth.
When we don’t lay claim to our creative impulse to share what we believe to be true about ourselves and the world around us, an agony festers from self-diminishment, and another thorn is added to the daily existence that encircles us.
It is amazing to think of how little it takes to make a girl, of a certain age and artistic temperament, believe she is in love.
Barbie was no longer afraid of anything. It was like the thing Mab had said about belief. The belief is sometimes the biggest part of it all. You can choose to believe in your published book being held in the loving hands of strangers, your name tattooed forever on the heart of the one you adore; you can choose to believe in tiny red-haired pesky piskies – all the things ‘they’ may tell you not to believe in. But who are they anyway? What do they know? What makes them any more real?
I don’t know about happily ever after... but I know about happily.
Then I wanted to take a bath so I ran water into the big sunken tub and poured in some bath salts and lit the candles in the square glass holders around the rim of the tub. There were big windows overlooking the garden. I opened them and smelled the jasmine and the wet earth. There was a little warm breeze and the garden tinkled and chimed like stars falling. I called you. I wanted a refill on my wine. I wanted to give you the jasmine and the wind chime stars. I’m sorry.
You’re just taking the blame on yourself to avoid confronting the fullscale victimization you underwent.