April 19, 2020

Writer Seeking Nonwriter. Response Greatly Needed: Where do your Emotions Go?

To those who don’t write: where do your emotions go?

Into spoken words? Does that work out okay? Are all your words safe to be spoken?

Do your emotions stay in your heart? How does it hold them forever? Is it genuinely infinite—the space in there?

Do your emotions go into the pavement? How do your hips and your knees hold up? And what happens when your neighbor is using the same pavement. Does it hold both? Neither? Does it tell?

Do the emotions go into your belly like cheese and wine? Do you need something harder for the bad days like ice cream, vodka, or drugs? Does that carry it all away or digest it into the clouds?

What do you do when reality doesn’t intersect with your moral code? When you want to say something but can’t say it because it breaks the balance you’ve worked so hard to maintain? What about the thoughts you can’t verbalize because it’s not your role at work? If it’s not your role, then it can’t be in your thoughts, let alone in your voice. Right? You could be found out for somebody who is “negative” and “not a team player,” and then you are done for.

To those who don’t write: do you dance? A lot?

Do you move it all out of your lungs and lymph? Or out from your fingers as they sway through the air to a beat and sassy lyric? Do you take pictures? Do you let other people see or keep it private in the pits of—where? Where do you keep those things? I know where the words I type are—they are here—but where is your dancing? Does it go to the heavens? Into the ground? Does it rise? Does it disintegrate? Do you wish we saw it?

To those who don’t write: do you feel it, like I feel it?

Do you have a burning in your chest? You know, that thing that needs to travel down to your groin or out through your mouth? Neither is okay, so out it comes through my fingers. Do you feel that? And where does it go for you? I know I’m redundant here, but it feels pressing. Where is everything at, if not on a page?

To those who don’t write: how (and where) do you contain your fire?

And does it feel good to hold it? Is it like a collection? Do you feel content? I know that this makes me sound like an asshole, but I don’t mean it like an asshole.

Picture me sitting across from you drinking a glass of wine. I am asking you earnestly and honestly. I am searching your eyes for something that maybe I can take for myself. Something to make me more feminine and less wolf. What do you do with your fire? Where does it go?

Or does it not rise up from you in the first place? That would be the first thought that gives me peace.

I think I’ll always rise out of my seat. I can’t imagine staying seated. It’s the blood I was born with. I am part wolf and part fire.

But, I’m still curious. If not on a page, where does it go? Responses desired and appreciated. 

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