The Intentions of Ink (#Panic)

The Intentions of Ink

The information I received caused my glass lake of a life to fall prey to a meteor shower of revelations.

Not for the first time, I would move.

Uprooted like a weed: "Heed the roots as well, so it won't grow back."

Picking a flower is an instant. It's chosen because it's admired.

Pulling a weed is a process, a necessity. It's done because it must be done.

To dispose of that which is not wanted.

My mother disclosed the news: we were to be relocated.

My expression at that moment was unreadable.

But that night, I perfected the art of crying silently. My frangible lake was shattered.

Instability and uncertainty, armed with shovels, dug a hole into which fell my mind.

I climbed my way out. A haven was dreamt, so fragile and beautiful that it could have been plucked, the delicate flower it was. Stolen, snapped, scorched.

My inner world.

My mechanism.

Creatures and friends I had grown in my head.

Panic drove me to develop my secret sanctuary.

My secret, subtle insanity.

I began school.

The solid facade of a perfect student was established.

I was not glass, but water.

Stronger than solid - supple, fluid, adaptable.

To be feared and admired, like icicles.

Or a shard of broken glass.

I cracked.

I had frozen. Developed. Could not recognize myself. Where was the world in my head, with its walls of imagined impenatrivity? Where could I reside when the emptiness came; milked my mind; stole the controls...

...I lost control. Wings bound, I fell.

I changed schools. A project, yes! To distract the mind from the thoughts of ink which evolved into a looming, black beast, proving liquid is the most dangerous matter, drenching plans in ebony, to be forgotten or abandoned.

I scrapbooked myself together until my invisibles were presentable. My secrets were buried, along with the roots some inexperienced hand left in the dirt, to become an undesirable plant once more.

The only way to distract the mind is to fill it, so I poured, squeezed, crammed. Math, science, history. I took up art and running, outlets for the panic.

Canvases wept paint, muscles screamed with pain. I poured, painted, puffed, and the ink was defeated. It melted, ice to the sun, into the soil: graveyard to those secrets, screams, tears, imaginings.

The monster returns, on occasion.

The garden it's fed breathes echoes of past emotions.

Moving hadn't caused my panic, but triggered it.

I was a flower, snapped— a weed, uprooted from familiar soil.

My lake's still, albeit the occasional rippling disturbance. But water is liquid, the strongest matter of them all, swallowing the disruption with a practiced fierceness. I strive for the same.

I still paint and run, but now I write as well. In my hand? A pen, ink-black as coal, stroking, sweeping along the paper with dexterity, completely submissive to my hand, my mind. Its intentions are no longer destructive, but constructive.

The ink is under my control, at last.