The Truth About Writing

         From the first time I laid pencil to paper and reached out to some mysterious person in the big wide world via pen-pal, I knew I had to write. I didn't know whether this person would like me or whether they'd think I was smart since my family didn't think much of me either; I only knew I had to try. I had to know if my existence was worth some contact back. And like a shipwreck stranded in the middle of nowhere I threw my proverbial 'note in a bottle' into the abyss of hope.

         My first letter arrived in the mail some weeks down the road and it was as if God himself had parted the heavens and found me. The connection I longed for in the form of a letter with my name on it, rested on the table where our family photographs stood. I wasn't allowed to read it until my mother saw it first. I didn't understand it. It was my letter. It had my name on it. But there were so many rules that didn't make sense and even more that changed with the weather. So I waited like a hungry dog, pacing back and forth till I wore out a pathway on the wooden floor. My grandmother slapped the side of my head, told me to go play outside or she'd throw the letter in the trash.

         But the minute I was given the letter, I read it with such thirst I thought I might choke with enthusiasm. I slept with it under my pillow for days afterward and wrote back as often as I was allowed since stamps and envelopes cost money we couldn't spare. But eventually my mother put a stop to that, seems I was preoccupied and happy and that just wasn't right in a house where happiness didn't live. So she brought me a diary and left it at that.

         I wrote dutifully, secretly. I wrote about hating my mother and what a monster she was. I said terrible things about her, calling her words even she didn't know I knew. So when she found my diary one rainy miserable day when I returned home from school, I was devastated. I thought for sure she would kill me the minute she laid my diary down. Instead, she questioned me about the horrific adjectives I used to describe my feelings toward her. I denied it all. I told her I didn't know what the words meant, and that I used them because it was words I heard. Yes I lied to her. But mostly I lied to myself.

        I denied everything I put down in the pages of that little book. Forgetting that that book was my friend, my confidant, the only thing in my existence I could trust. I would tell her everything and she wouldn't ridicule me or hit me. In her pages I was allowed all the liberties of a freed man.

         But when I picked up my diary from the couch where mother had left it sitting, I felt the beaten and bludgeoned pages of a faint pulse. It was rape all over again and I couldn't look at her...ashamed and betrayed. I'd never write again, not like that anyway. And when I did it sounded like lies. Lies that colored the truth so nobody got hurt. And I knew that place was gone, the room where my soul cried for God to take me. I had hurt my mother, and grandmother made sure to remind me daily, "More betta you neva was born."

         I turned one of my note books into a journal but kept it in my locker at school. Though the sentences that once made me feel as if I wasn't alone in the world failed to resonant a resemblance of my former self. Nope, it was gone. She was gone. She didn't trust me anymore. Even when I promised to tell the world how horrible the beatings and the humiliation was. How being born into a dark-skinned Hawaiian family, a little girl with sunshine hair and skin the color of a sandy beach, meant that I was somehow broken and unworthy of affection (not the good kind anyway).

         But life goes on and time passes and since I couldn't write, I drank. And when I couldn't drink I fought with the world; even took on God a couple of times. I drove my husband crazy trying to convince him that he was the crux of all my misery. That if he was just a little more caring, a little more loving, or a little more protective my life would be wonderful...but it wasn't.  It isn't a wonderful life because I abandoned the voice of my youth under a pile of rubble and left her to die. But life found a way and 'truth' crawled out from under the debris.

         I'm fifty-one years old now and remarried the man I once believed didn't love me. "I like quit my job." I told him.

         “Quit, we'll be okay.” Somehow I believe him. Maybe because I'm older or maybe because life's too short for bullshit. Or perhaps I need someone in this great big world besides the voices in my head, to tell me it's okay...all of it.

        “No worry about finding another job," he said. "Just write."

         “I scared...” I whispered, nestled beside him on our bed. The AC cold and soothing against the heat of another Hawaii scorcher.

         “Then write about that...”