Bare (5 minute prompt)

Bare 3/22/14

What does it mean to write?  It means to bare your soul.  To put it down on a page that neither likes nor dislikes you.  The page is merely the medium to where you want your words to go.  Sometimes the words flow.  Sometimes they are stopped up like a plugged up toothpaste container that has sat for too long.  The outside grown over with hardened toothpaste.  And you have to push just a little bit, to get something to come out.  And sometimes it is what you are looking for and sometimes it isn’t. Sometimes a few words suffice and you fill the expanse with the exact emotion that you were looking for.  Sometimes the words just aren’t enough.  You continue to write and write.  Never hitting the exact sentiment you were looking for.  Finally you give up and add some trite finishing sentence that doesn’t really complete anything.  But then you come back, a few months or years later, and see that same piece you were working on.  And you think, “I might try this again.”  So, you do and what comes out is as eye opening for you as it might be for someone else.  And you think, “That’s exactly what I was trying to say! How could I not get that out before?”  And you know it is because you didn’t have the experience.  Because you didn’t have the necessary tools to let the words flow.  And so you see that the more experience you have, the more life you have lived, the more things you have seen, the better able you are to convey your ideas.  The ideas that have become your life.  As simple as the chores that need to be done or the faces that need to be wiped.  But these things that sometimes stand out in the open are so hard to grasp onto.  You want to do them justice.  And in doing so, you have to bare your soul.  You have to accept that what you put onto the paper might hurt or heal you, but in doing so, you have been honest with yourself.  And sometimes, that is the reason to write.