WRITING IS MY THERAPY

by Jessica Oakwood

The sound of my hands on the keys is like the start of rainfall. It relaxes me, it’s meditative. The blank document a canvas on which I can perform tricks.

Language is the trusty skateboard at my side. or perhaps the words are the prestige in a magic trick. The butt of a joke that isn’t meant to be funny.

I don’t feel truly myself unless my hands are on the keys processing my feelings on word processor I question often if I really want to write but when I do, I think of my two tattoos an A and Z in Baskerville Old Face one on each wrist.

Faded now over the years. A well-worn reminder that I shouldn’t try to kill myself again that I don’t always heed.

I don’t tell people that though I just say I am a writer and that they represent the alphabet

Happiness can be found in the curve of a well crafted sentence in the breakthrough of a piece that makes you feel like sunlight Is under your fingertips. And then you find homes for these stories, poems, essays like they are homeless hermit crabs looking for shells on the beach.

I wonder sometimes what grounds people without a purpose because for me, peace can always be found in the eye of a blinking curser my hands playing the MacBook like an instrument,

The sound of the keys tapping a concerto.