"Bitterness is a paralytic," says the Cumberbatch Sherlock, and I wince a trifle self-consciously. I can't move. There is nothing to invite me into living. I am waiting for something that I don't know, that doesn't come, and doesn't come, and doesn't come. Waiting for a moment in which I say, "This is why I am here. This is my reason." Dragging my feet through a logical plan that ought to be exciting, pulling my sled behind me through mud and ice, weighted down by an unknown gravity. I forge my chains like Marley, link by link and yard by yard, coiling them around and around me to move too slowly through a fleeting life.
I do what anyone might do in such a circumstance. I memorize poetry. I read it before sleep every night, and collect its gems carefully, as if storing away treasure for an unknown future. It surrounds my desk. Fawcett, Green, Donne, Southey, Frost, Herbert. I seem driven to be engulfed in other people's words at the very time that I can't write or even speak my own. All is a chaotic silence within me.
Sometimes you don't realize what you have, until you lose it. Now that I can't even write my thoughts, I miss those words I didn't realize I had. My pen hovers night after night above the page, eager to spill its ink out of my scattered mind and into rivulets of meaning, but nothing. Nothing happens, and nothing happens, and nothing happens.
I read. Frustrated, I play Bach faster than I ought, and I play Chopin with all the emotion I can't express in writing. I look for my words in gratitude, in prayer, in conversations, in music, and I don't just feel that I have lost something precious, but that I myself am lost. Lost without the words that have become all-important. Lost without the freshly inked pages of my soul. Lost without my one human medium of communication.
The solution is laughable, so I laugh at it unrestrictedly. I am not lost without my one human medium of communication, because there isn't one human medium of communication. "You fell victim to one of the classic blunders!" shrieks a funny little man from years ago, and I grin helplessly but happily as I sit at my little desk and realize my mistake. I looked for my words in gratitude, in prayer, in conversations, in music, not because they would magically give my words back, but because these things are my words. These things are my human communication, fragile and eternal.
Gratitude describes the blessing, prayer worships the Giver, conversation fills surprising dialogues, music speaks the very soul. Words. And in the middle of this entirely unsurprising yet wonderful discovery, The Word, not my own but of Another, sings. The Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld His glory. His Glory. As of the only begotten from the Father, full of grace and truth. Always the abundance. Always the fullness.
The words will come again. They never really left me. Freedom comes with the acceptance of freedom. I move again, to find that the chains are only in my head. Marley's ghost is nothing, after all, but a bit of undigested beef.
