I Wish I'd Written This

Mid-February

I wish you could hear how quiet it is here. The last of summer’s nights. The shh shh shh of the wind in the eucalyptus leaves. The snap of dry grass and twigs under the dog’s paws. Cicadas. It’s another kind of song. I wish you could see how dark the night sky is. Here. The stars. The sky full and rich, hangs velvet curtain low. After the rush of stories and words and sorrow and music and a thumping beat. This is all I want. I don’t seek the grit, the dirt, the tarnish of before. More than anything this stillness. This alive. This quiet. This solitude. This alone. I think sadness stains skin and teeth and bones and tongue and eyelids and fingertips. I think it soaks and seeps and bleaches strong.  There are so many descriptions, dark and bruised and melancholy. I think of cherries and blueberries and the tart sweetness of my tongue. My purple blue stained fingers. And always we must do something to clean the stain, to cleanse and to make fresh and bright and shiny. Like happiness is an imperative. I can listen to the song without singing, I’ll take the imperfect sweet, I’ll wear the stain. More than anything this alone. This dark heavy with stars. To make my own.

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This comes from a blog called She Was. The author says: 'Everything I write here is yours to make of as you wish.' What I make of it is that it's prose-poetry. (And occasionally she even breaks into actual verse.)

The blog is minimalist, plain black and white, elegant but undecorated. It is also anonymous. I do know the first name of the author and a tiny part of her history, as I have been following her posts for a long time and we have had a little correspondence. Suffice to say that when I first encountered her blog — which had a different name then — she was a young expatriate Australian living in Greece. Her marriage to a Greek man was breaking up, and she was very homesick. Soon afterwards she returned home to live. Some of her posts at that time were autobiographical, others were presented as pieces of fiction, even if they did contain factual elements. (Well, I was never sure if they did.) Either way, the beauty, intensity and originality of the writing astounded and captivated me.

After she came back home, at some point she changed the name of the blog, and the posts became more mysterious and even more interior. She goes into the most revealing detail about thoughts and feelings, without giving away anything more than she needs to on the practical level. I assume the writing is autobiographical, but sometimes I wonder — and in any case it doesn't actually matter. What matters is the undoubted truth of the emotional reality she describes. That's so true it could burn you!

She tells me it's hard for her to see her writing as 'good'. But there must be some sort of compulsion, as she keeps doing it. I think that's the vocation of a true writer. Anyway, I hope she continues, because it's extraordinary and wonderful. I've never found anything else like it.

So there's no photo this time, and no list of published books to refer you to. The only place I know to find more of her writing is the blog itself. She doesn't make it easy to scroll back through past posts, either, but persevere — this writing is worth it.

Poems and photos used in ‘I Wish I’d Written This’ remain the property of the copyright holders (usually their authors).