by Allison Marie Conway
Art & Soul

Only Way Out

Leaning over the counter top painting my toenails a deep raisin, I am wishing I were a better writer. You know like the ones who can conjure up an entire world made electric with the sweetness of wicked delicious fantasy. Most people think writing is just about writing but it isn’t. It’s so much more than that. Writing is about coming undone and dying inside over and over. It’s about becoming the person you always knew you could be without the hindrance that is most of the rest of this ridiculous life. It’s about giving a middle finger to the rest of the world because you know they are ignorant to all of your most sacred fears and why they matter so much to you. It’s about fingering your darkest secrets until they flower for you into everything that makes your gums bleed with naked desire; the way you obsess over the guy with the shifty eyes like blades and the scent on the summer breeze as the evening sifts inside your open bedroom window. It’s about hungry mouths and the aching memory of bathing nude with a lover under the cascade of a secluded waterfall. It’s about the glistening tangerine light glinting down the side of a pink wine bottle as it sweats from coming right out of the fridge onto the back patio in the balmy air.

It’s about the glistening tangerine light glinting down the side of a pink wine bottle as it sweats from coming right out of the fridge onto the back patio in the balmy air.

If you can really do it—if you can really write, like write with the very best of them, the rest of the world doesn’t even have to exist at all. Because you have enough dirty love in your sad little heart and enough big impossible visions swirling like stars in your weary head that you don’t need anybody else. Or anything else. Not time or space or permission. You don’t need healing you just need a way to let it all out and sex won’t come close and drinking won’t fix the scars on your bruised insecurities. Only writing. Only the brutality and beauty of the chasing of the words and the spinning of the scenes and the giving of your entire soul to something that will kick you in the teeth just as readily as it will cradle you in your darkest hour. That’s what writing is and so few have any idea. At least, it should be.

Allison Marie Conway has been writing poetry since she was ten years old, and is now the author of two published books. Every Monday she sends out a little love letter to fellow kindred creatives. You can sign up to receive these, and find out more about Allison, at her website.