There is a story inside me that longs to be told.  It is a story of an emergence from a dispassionate life created amidst the daily chaos and years of pushing it down and back. I cannot tell you the story; speak the words. I am …. afraid to speak. Still, now. I write because I cannot say it. I can tell you the events, matter of fact, as though someone else’s life. Yet I cannot verbalize the feeling, the emotion. The utter weight of the shame put upon me, which was not mine to assume. My voice cannot be shouted out if I have none. My words cannot be twisted around if they do not pass my lips. I can predict how they are received if I do not say them.

Today I decided to write my life as a novel. My life after. In it I create me. A character that moves between the pages of past and present, public and private. My character breaks free from her past. Like a tethered balloon that once struggled against the ties that bound it, I am finally cut loose and float weightlessly, skyward.

In the book I’ve created, I escape into someone else, if even for just a little while. Someone anonymous. Unknown. Someone who does not have a history. I become the woman who is inside me; without shame, without accusations. The heroine, who against the odds survived, now content to be invisible in anonymity; no scars or events to explain. There are no questions to answer, there is no emotion to untangle. In the space between the words on the pages, lines fade and blur. I write her free of it all in this part of her story. No longer struggling to define what is black and white, she settles to accept the gray in her life. She is the gray.

All the roads we have to walk are winding, and all the lights that lead the way are blinding. Ryan Adams