The blank page stares at me, its whiteness all-encompassing until I’m drowning in it.

These words are rare, stilted, and awkward. It’s like my brain has forgotten how to transfer thoughts into words to my fingers. The different components are rusty, as they twist and turn together painfully to try and make this work. To try and explain what I feel.

Instead I’m left with thoughts. Ugly, deep, messy, and complicated thoughts. They flutter around in my head, like birds with broken wings, completely ungraceful and undignified. I try to catch one and tame it, but it dodges all my efforts. It is hopeless.

This is not poetry or anything beautiful that will evoke deep emotions or provoke rapid actions. This is instead a collection of the broken, jumbled, fragmented thoughts floating around in my head. This is me.

I have been moving for so long that I haven’t stopped to peer inside at what’s going on inside of me. I try to remember the last time I put pen to paper or even finger to keyboard, and come up completely blank. I have been running for so long that it’s painful to stop. I honestly don’t know how to stop. But then I remind myself, isn’t this why I kept moving?

For someone who loved to live inside her head for most of her life, I’m finding it rather hard to find my place inside of it. I blame motherhood for this ailment, since most of my thoughts shooting around inside my head relate to my strong-willed, active, talkative daughter, and the day to day management of the house. There is no room for pretty poetry or astute observations about the world or people around me. There is mostly boring monologue about endless housework and cooking and bedtime and cleaning and scheduling that shoots through like a train.

But I long to return to the house in my head, a place where I created words and worlds, castles and caves, depth and drama, love and light. They poured out of me, pooling page after page, filling the emptiness with life. Now, there is so much life around me, but all I do is consume it. It doesn’t fill me. There is only emptiness inside now.

My soul aches from the emptiness, the boredom and the silence, of staring at screens and consuming other people’s worlds. I long to feel productive and tired from using my brain to think and create, and not just using my body to run around.

And so I’m looking for a way to bring back the light so I can dust the cobwebs from the corners of my soul, and find my way back home.