Skeleton with a Heart

The worry bubbled up inside her until she felt that she would burst. Her throat felt tight as though she would throw up all the words that she didn’t know how to say. The blank page before her seemed to align itself with her emptiness, and there was no way to fill it.

Even if she could write, her hand would shake so much the words wouldn’t make a strong enough impression on the page, and therefore wouldn’t have any affect on the reader. The Reader? she heard the question asked to herself by the voice in her head, but you don’t have any readers, you only have yourself.

Sat in her bedroom, she looked around. It was true, she was alone. The words she wished to write wouldn’t come because she worried too much about who would read them, and whether they would enjoy it. But she realised that, being the only person there, the words only mattered to one person, and that was herself.

It doesn’t matter if you write badly, just write something, anything. It will be good enough. Only then did she begin to view the situation differently:

‘All I need to do,’ she told herself, ‘is write the skeleton of a story, or the skeleton of a poem. I can flesh it out later, and in doing so give it a heart. I will write a skeleton with a heart.’

She wanted to hold onto this thought, so that whenever she hit a block in the road, a block in her thoughts, she could remember that a skeleton with a heart is good enough.

© Jade Moore 2015