What I learned today.

I've just come inside, and I can still feel the briskness of early spring on my face.

I took the long way home, walking slowly enough for the overcast day to settle down upon me, slowly enough for my thoughts to run clear, cold and grey like the sky above.

I did what I often do when walking alone - I engaged in a sort of self-conversation. More than mere musing, actually articulated, my lips subtly moving. I sometimes wonder how strange, how anti-social, how utterly insane I look like when I do this.

It does not matter. I do it anyway. I whisper those things that I cannot say out loud, those things I dare not write about. The inexpressible, the unutterable.

But, more and more, I realize that these are the things I need to write about. These are the things that we all write about. Literature, art, articulation, is not about stating the simple, the declarative, but about giving shape to the inherently intangible. We write around those blank spaces, those abstract beauties and tragedies, not to define what they are, but to give a sense of the mark they make, their shadows, the faintest silhouette of what they might look like. Language fails when confronted with these emptinesses, and that is exactly why we must keep writing, telling our stories.

I cannot say what it is, but my words will fall around it and show exactly where it's been.

That blank expanse of sky, that silence, that hushed breath; the unconquerable blue of an ocean, a glance, the way the wind touches our skin.

That is everything, and that is what write around, what we live around, dancing close but never near enough.