thank you

06/01/2020

Dear you

It’s 2020 now and so much has changed since I first started writing this blog in 2014, as a 14 year old really nervous and really excited teenager sitting on my dining table wondering what I wanted my first blog post to be about. It’s been six years now and I still don’t know how to write or what to write about today. I have so much to say though. These past six years have been so long and so short at the same time, it’s almost as if if I were to take a step back, I’d be right where it all started, sitting on my rooftop with a pencil in one hand and a yearly planner in the other, that I called my “fancy diary,” trying to write how the sky and the sunflowers made me feel. Today, I have more than 34 actually fancy diaries, yet I’m still typing all this out on my laptop, wondering how the sky and the sunflowers don’t make me feel as they used to anymore.

I wish I could describe these past six years in passport metaphors and height marks on bedroom walls but they’ve been so much more than just that. I’ve grown a lot. I’ve learnt how to spell professor and Kerala, I’ve learnt how to drive without having someone lecture me on speed breakers every two seconds, I’ve fallen in love and fallen out of love, I’ve found an adequate hairstyle that I don’t feel like fixing every two minutes, and I’ve learnt how to dance, without having to think what my 7^th grade dance teacher would have to say about it. I can cook myself breakfast without burning my finger on the stove every thirty seconds, I’m singing again and relearning why I started singing in the first place, and I’m laughing a lot more, a lot louder and without thinking as much about it. I write a lot lesser now but I’ve been writing a lot more for myself. I’ve turned experience into poetry and poetry into an experience. I wish I could write about how I’m feeling at this very moment. It’s ironic how I call myself a poet yet I run out of words exactly when I need them the most.

The past two years have also been the most challenging of my life. I’ve experienced moments where I’ve forgotten what taste felt like, I tried learning how to mourn and I mourned so much I forgot living for a while, and I’ve had to write an obituary, my hands trembled so much more with each letter I wrote yet I’ve had to stand in front of the world and read it out, word by word, holding tears back with every syllable. I’ve experienced moments when I’ve wanted to unlearn poetry, forgetting why I ever wanted to learn it in the first place but I’ve made it through them and I’m here now. I’m here now, but I keep having to remind myself what here means.

I’m proud of myself. It’s taken me a long time to understand what that means and I still have a long way to go, but I hope I have my poetry with me, at every step, because it’s a long journey and it sure as hell gets lonely a lot.

I don’t think I’ve ever been this honest in any of my blog posts yet but I’ve been learning how to be more honest with my poetry, and with myself, and I really hope that this honesty stays.

Today, my blog completes six years, and I feel like I’ve completed my own little journey with it. Thank you, to all those of you who have read and supported and loved my poems, over the years.

Thank you for staying and making sure that my words feel complete in this world. It does mean the world to me.

So thank you.

I hope to write more and I hope to write soon.

Love,

Emm Ess

06/01/2020