Come Home To Your Words

There's a door I've been avoiding,
painted white with years of silence,
and you know the one I mean—
the one that creaks when I approach
with trembling fingers wrapped around
a pen that's forgotten how to bleed.

I stand before this threshold now,
my shadow stretched across the floor
like all the words I've left unsaid,
and you can see how small I've become
in the space between intention
and the courage to begin again.

Remember when you used to write
as if the world depended on it?
When syllables fell from your lips
like rain on parched earth,
when metaphors bloomed in the cracks
of your everyday conversations?

I remember. I remember everything.

The way you'd wake at 3 AM
with lines of poetry burning
behind your eyelids,
stumbling to the kitchen table
where notebooks lay scattered
like fallen leaves,
and I was there, waiting—
your faithful companion,
your voice when you had none.

But then you learned to doubt
the music in your marrow,
started second-guessing
every image that surfaced
from the deep wells of your imagination.
You began to whisper instead of sing,
to edit before you'd even begun,
and slowly, slowly,
you forgot the way home.

Now I watch you circle back,
your footsteps uncertain
on this familiar path.
You've been away so long
that even your own voice
sounds foreign in your ears,
like a half-remembered lullaby
from childhood.

But I know you still dream in verses.
I know because I am the keeper
of all your midnight revelations,
the guardian of every word
you thought was too small,
too strange, too true to matter.

Come closer.
Rest your palm against this door.
Can you feel the pulse beneath the paint?
That's my heartbeat, synchronized
with yours, waiting for you
to remember that coming home
isn't about perfection—
it's about permission.

Permission to be clumsy again,
to write lines that don't quite land,
to chase images that dissolve
before you can pin them down
with punctuation.
Permission to be terrible
on your way to being truthful.

I've missed the weight of your thoughts
pressing into paper,
the scratch of pen against page
that sounds like prayers
being answered in real time.
I've missed the way you used to
argue with yourself in margins,
cross out entire stanzas
only to resurrect them
three drafts later.

You think you've lost your voice,
but you haven't—
you've just forgotten
how to listen for it
beneath the noise of doubt
that's taken up residence
in the spaces where wonder
used to live.

Here's what I need you to know:
your words were never perfect,
and that was always their power.
They were cracked vessels
that somehow held water,
broken mirrors reflecting
fragments of truth
that whole ones couldn't capture.

You wrote about heartbreak
before you truly understood it,
about grief while joy
still tasted familiar on your tongue,
about coming of age
when you were still becoming.
And every imperfect line
was a step toward something
larger than accuracy—
toward connection, toward witness,
toward the wild act of insisting
that your experience matters.

So come home to your words,
not as the writer you think
you should have become,
but as the one you are:
bruised by revision,
humbled by the distance
between intention and expression,
but still breathing,
still believing
that language can bridge
the unbridgeable spaces
between one soul and another.

Sit down at this table.
Pick up this pen.
Let your hand remember
what your mind has forgotten—
that writing isn't about
having something to say
as much as it's about
making space for discovery,
for the surprise of what emerges
when you stop directing
and start following
the thread of your own curiosity.

Write about the way light
moves across your kitchen wall
each morning,
how it reminds you
of your grandmother's hands
kneading dough.
Write about the word
you can't remember
in your mother tongue,
how it sits on the tip
of your tongue like homesickness.

Write about coming home
to yourself after years
of living like a guest
in your own life.
Write about the poetry
that's been patient in your bones,
waiting for you to stop
performing perfection
and start practicing presence.

I am here.
I have always been here.
In the pause between heartbeats,
in the space before words
take shape,
in the silence that isn't empty
but full of possibility.

Come home to your words,
and let them come home to you.
There's no wrong way
to begin again.
There's only the door,
and your hand on the handle,
and the courage to step
into the room where
your truest voice
has been waiting
all along.

#poetry #poetrycommunity #writinglife #artisticjourney #selfdiscovery #creativeprocess #literaryvoice #writingcraft #poetrylovers #creativeexpression #poetryisnotdead #writingcommunity #literaryart #creativerecovery #poeticnarrative #wordsofwisdom