Pen to Paper

By Liaden Afteh

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Pen to paper. Empty lines run across the page like hazard lights on a highway. They stare, beckoning you to write. You are doe eyed and still.
 
The process of writing a song isn’t always seamless. There is the anxiety of the emotion you’re feeling. The fear to fully open up a gash inside by carving out the core of your heart with ink. So, you put it off. Put off the cementing, but the thought inside you only continues to growl until it can no longer be ignored.

​Then it is late at night, where the minutes of today begin to roll over into tomorrow. Resting in its darkness, you find that you can see. Your eyes adjust like a fox in the midnight woods and you begin to not just make sense of your vision, but the thoughts that could not be voiced in daylight.
 
Your house stands still, the corridors creaking with only the sound of sleep. Sleep that cannot find you. You that sits somewhere in between. Awake enough to finally see, but asleep enough to not fear admission. In a state where the seed that began growing inside of you cannot be muted anymore.
 
And then you write. You write without thinking, faster than your hands can manage. Your fingers bounce against the light of your screen and your ears are filled with the soft pitter-patter of your mobile keyboard.
 
The more you write, the more that swelling ocean storming inside of you begins to drain. It pours out like a tsunami, with no regard to what it crashes onto.
 
But she still twists and turns until those thoughts turn into music. Until the right echoes and rings embody the words you’ve written. And then you remember that you are making magic.