Speak

If will alone was a super power, I'd be a comic book hero.

I visualized myself winning a writing competition; the first one I've ever entered. I was notified that I was a finalist and didn't exhale it seemed for a good five minutes. I could feel my character breathing out her history. I thought my story had legs and could run marathons. It must have sauntered casually to that finish line however, and others crossed it first, and second, and third...

My left hand is the conduit through with communication must steadily flow and somehow the space between my brain and said hand loses something in the translation, because I can very rarely SPEAK effectively. I'm married to a National debate champion and the mother to two offspring who talk circles around me, straight from the womb.

And yet, with paper and pen I'm alive and I can pretend...I can pretend I won. That I won the contest and that I walked up on a stage. That there was a microphone so imposing that it made me cross my bleary eyes which blocked the courteous clip clapping of the crowd that came to hear me read my words, my soul. That my children could see their mother achieve something, anything so that they too may know that they can hurdle their Everest.

I picture myself reading, nervous, tremulous diction and damp underarms, but lit up like Christmas morning. My best clothes, straightened hair, unshed tears, a hidden heart resurrected; crazy glued together and soaring into another time...another place...another life.

I WILL do what I dream to do because there is no choice. I was born to speak, though one has to read in order to hear what I'm really needing, yearning, crying to tell them. Someday I will succeed...and until then my left hand will not stop dog paddling through this ocean of words I need to flood my empty pages with.

Because I have a story to tell.