If You Can Abstain from Being Its Murderer, Then You Shall be Its Savior

I need to quiet my mind, the state I am in now forbids intellect and plays within the realms of fantasy. Thoughts are scattered, I feel simultaneously empty and filled to the brim. My mind races through visions without form. Ideas are nebulous and incomplete. For a moment I capture one, and like a bird, hold it within the palm of my hand. My fingers stroke its wings and head, denying flight. It trembles for my foreign touch. In pity and heartbreak, I release it into an element of its own design. Such a thing is more pleasing to it than my coarse hand.

Where did the visionary go? The writer of this age was lost within the tumult of a bygone generation. I long for a place whose name I do not know. I wish to escape, feel a foreign land 'neath my runner's stride, and to know the ground so trembles by my being there, to be the cause of some effect, the catalyst of an age yet to be born. The labor pains make me gasp and thrust this beaten body upon its knees.

My beautiful bird wings the clouds in his flight and traces the horizon with his agile body. He is a solitary creature though, singing but to himself and the heavens. He looks no more at me, feet fast to the earth and eyes on his downy breast. I had believed I knew what freedom felt like, believed to have held it in my palm. Such things were not meant to be held. My cold hands became his prison. I marveled at him behind my fingers and he glared back at me through bars.

We hold too tightly that which we love, and strangle that which we feel we cannot live without. I often wonder how many things have met their fate in my hands, how many precious dreams, ideas, and memories I have asphyxiated. They go silently.

Tell me, is this the reason you place that which I desire just beyond my reach? You yet fear that I will crush it? In my younger years I contemplated how it was that a person became a writer, how he or she chose to joyfully accept the call of the pen, as it so beckoned. I realized some time ago that the pen does not ask, but commands. Like a slave master, it drives you into the night, paying heed neither to cries for rest, nor the blisters upon your hands. Taking all, it seldom gives. The reprieve you feel is but an illusion, the swallow you held in your hand, for a time, quickly forgets your smile and remembers no more your prodding touch. It now soars beyond the edges of infinity. Why now should its gaze be directed once more toward earth and you?

If you so love it and did love it as you say you had and do, then you will rejoice for the captive, who, now free, remembers his cage no more. Rejoice for that which escapes your grasp. If you can abstain from being its murderer, then you shall be its savior.