Words

I've been lost to the doing recently.
And then it began to rain and didn't stop.
So I sat a while, and slowly picked up where I'd left off, thoughts becoming the tippity tap of a keyboard.
There are other ways to be productive, something I often forget.
3500 words added today, some might even make the final cut.

Excerpt

Words can be a cruel weapon, so often they were a precursor to violence in my youth, they did just as much damage. You’d come to recognise the pattern, know the triggers, good words meant with bad intent. Words that were the forewarning of where events were heading, words that were his foreplay to violence. Words said on the turning, sneered and sullen, malice meant, solicitous questions with no right answers. Words intended to hurt just as much as the punches and the kicks. Psychological abuse to bruise all the way down to your last sense of self. This was the violence that shaped us, that opened the door to so much worse for my mum, this was the way he broke any understanding of what love should be, what it really is.

But, as ever and always, real truths are only really found when you see all of a thing.

Words can be an embrace, they can lift you up just as physically as they knock you down. Words of love are the spell that lets you fly. They’re the soft given strength that pushes your hands into the ground as you get up one more time, they’re the shields that protect the you trying just to survive inside. Words of love spoken whenever or even only once yet remembered when it really matters can be the most precious thing in the world, a lifeline of hope as you begin to drown. They can be impossible to hear, they might fall on moment deaf ears but if you can learn to accept them and carry them forward with you they can be everything.

Violence never really fixed anything. For the longest time I thought it was just the violence that made me strong. I was never bigger or faster in a fight. I used to pick fights because I was small and people thought they’d win. But I always got back up and that was usually enough. Yet resilience without adaptation eventually leads to fatigue. If you go and go and go again with no hope of a destination then I promise eventually you will fall.

Words could have fixed everything.

Words of love would have fixed everything.

That's the truth at the bottom of the abyss.