Our anniversary last night seemed like the right moment and as he slept I crept into the room and washed my hands and grasped slippery steel and twisted and twisted and twisted until my tongue was untied, loose and free. So I cried, set it down on the counter, and tasted words

unfettered

go to the other

I never believed that inhibiting the articulation of words would inhibit the articulation of self.  The moments of first freedom proved me wrong. At the time I didn’t know what I was doing. It had no meaning other than an action, a thing, the placement of New within. But over time it gained its own power, its own significance, and over time it began to hold my selfhood within it. It created the boundaries of who I was, and who I wasn’t.   At first did I know boundaries are also limitations? I didn’t even know they were there. I simply knew that before I was Not, and after, i Was. Though I could not articulate what exactly I Was, and what exactly I was No Longer.

So this Thing now weighed my expression, became the secret of my difference, became a reminder to others that I was not like them, but like someone else. All in difference, all in sameness, none in me. The turning point may have been when I saw how It was the ONLY articulation of me, and all else had become a cover story, seen through the Thing as being untrue to the secret of my difference.  Is that a life worth committing to? when your truth is only a secret and your whole expression of self is locked in one tiny piece of surgical steel, holding the balance of words and life on the tip of your tongue?

It sits on the counter and I sit on the couch, and I am the only power inside me now.