Fall 2021 Contest Finalist
The Heart Knows the Way
Poetry Contest, the newspaper clipping read. I was seven years old, and had only a vague inkling of what poetry was. Writing, poetry was writing. So, I picked up a pen, or maybe it was a crayon, and started telling stories. The heart knows; and sometimes, the universe conspires for beautiful things.
My family sent it in with a stamp and a year later we held a poetry book. The words make no sense to me now, but they were mine; and they told a story then. I’m not sure what a publisher saw in a seven-year-old’s bitter complaints about too much snow, the only heartbreak at such a tender age; but would you believe that the first submission was a yes?
I’ve been telling stories ever since I learned I could. For my whole life, I’ve been losing myself in other worlds, the narratives of all of the great heroes. I’ve seen dragons, and picked a path in roads diverged. I have learned that there is magic within my fingertips, and that spells can be broken with love. Admittedly, these life lessons have caused some heartache in their time, but nothing a good book or a fictional character could not make just a little better.
In writing, I’ve created a magic and time all of my own. There is something precious within the pages, held tenderly and close to the chest, words that seem to flow to your heartbeat. I’ve said hello and goodbye to characters, and shared them with some of the great loves of my life. They each have their time, their adventure, their story. They are with me. The heart knows. The right story lands in my lap, or weighs on my chest just when it matters most. Call it the universe’s intuition, or call it a little bit of the magic the rest of the world has forgotten about. I am seen, I become. And yet, in discovering how to create stories, there was yet a piece of myself unforged.
I was eleven, when I first heard the word lesbian. I didn’t know what it meant, only that it was something terrible, according to my mother, and to the church I’d grown up in. But when I met my stepfather’s mother, she was nothing but kind. There were no monsters to battle, nothing to fear. Just a woman, who, as it turned out, loved another woman with all of her heart. Such a thing could be done?
I was thirteen when I met the first girl that I loved. We didn’t call it that. Together, we crafted worlds with ink and notebook paper. I found myself in the comfortable role of hero, tall and masculine, a poet, a traveller from somewhere I’d never been. I remember him, he played piano, and his brother that came later, played the violin. The heart knows.
When she kissed me, I was not me, and she was not her. We were characters, of course. And there, I found safety, and warmth. The pen ran out of ink when I wrote the words I love you.
They didn’t belong to me. They were safe because they didn’t belong to me.
I wish I could go back hug the human being trapped in expectations set of being a straight woman. I now know I am neither of those things. And it, too, is an unending journey.
Words on a page are still my life, wherein I speak the greatest of my truths where it is safe to do so. I loved, and I loved, and I loved. I have lost, and I have gained. These are my victories, these are my tragedies. I am both hero, and villain.
Characters have shaped me in every way I have shaped them. To fall in love with a character of mine, is to fall a little in love with the author’s heart. I sometimes wonder how many people in the world hold just a little piece of me. How many of those pieces have changed with time, adapted and became something else.
The heart knows. It’s always known. And maybe, my readers’ hearts understand. What it means to be queer when you’ve never had a name for the way you were different. What it means to be broken, by hands that were meant to hold, meant to protect. How to keep yourself safe in secrets, in words, in thoughts, in stories that you pick up, in the pages you read and especially the ones bent down a little too far.
What it means to be quiet, when inside you is a storm, waiting to burst from you like the powerful water you so fear. How tears become rain. How the hero’s hands ache from carrying the weight of the world. How the hero is remade in clay, resculpted into someone who can carry it just a little longer.
How broken pieces in the universe are just pieces of a puzzle, and that jagged edges can fit together too. How there is a greater purpose in things, and how you can learn to love someone because of a poem you wrote when you didn’t know what poetry was. How every piece is a star, and every star forms a constellation. The beauty of things that come together. And how, even when all falls apart, dot to dot, they are connected to the magnificent whole.
