When Things Go Quiet

"I said nothing for a time, just ran my fingertips along the edge of the human-shaped emptiness that had been left inside me."

- Haruki Murakami; Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman 

Things have been quiet on this blog of mine for quite some time.

My mentor-teacher-turned-good-friend Stephanie knows me extremely well; she knows exactly what my silence means. Actually, she taught me about what my silence means. Stephanie always says that she knows something's wrong - that things aren't quite okay - when I go quiet. I hadn't ever realized it until she brought it to my attention, but it has proven to be true time and time again. If you watch the patterns on my blog, or especially on my Instagram, you can generally tell how things are going with me.

But I've been relatively quiet (at least compared to normal) on Instagram lately. And I'd definitely call zero blog posts in over two months quiet on that front. So obviously things aren't okay. And when things aren't okay, I don't write. That's just the way it is with me. Even when I want to write about superficial things or trips we've taken, I can't.

We've been home for just over two months, and we'll head back to England exactly three weeks from now as long as things go according to plan - or according Plan A, at least; Plan B is a totally different story.

We didn't plan on coming home. We're exceedingly glad we could, of course; but if coming home meant things didn't turn out the way they did, I would have chosen not to come home at all. Our world has been rocked in a way I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy, but there's no sense in calling the sky anything but blue. It is what it is, and all we can do is keep putting one foot in front of the other.

But I want to get back to writing. So this is me breaking that silence. Word by word. Line by line. Post by post.

If I'm being completely honest, I'm not sure that I'm entirely ready to really get back into writing on a consistent basis because that means processing some very difficult things that I've tried to keep hidden in the corner of the closet; but I've figured out that writing is a survival tactic for me, so write I must.

The silence must cease, and the only way to end it is to speak.