Don't mind me.. I'm just having a conversation with myself....

Vulnerability.
The inconvenient concept of authenticity.
Mush.

"People have been messing with my mush all my life," I wrote once, when an intuitive writer friend politely pointed out that my writing was "susceptible to wounds." I was miffed. What did she know about my writing, or me, for that matter? So I hemmed, hawed, wrangled....and finally took it as a challenge. I began to talk to myself ever so loudly on the subject of courage - wrestling with the wisdom of risking a heart that is open or sleepwalking through a life lived dormant and barren. Would I allow the truth to spill out of this pen - and my life - without censor? And regardless of criticism? I had no choice really. I'm not developing my niche. I'm a pencil mess of a genre all by myself thank you very much and already wading in a pool filled to the brim with possibilities. All I have to do is dip my toe in the fountain and the page fills up to overflowing - soggy wounds and all.
The story I see in my head is in bed with and married to the paper.

This is consensual monogamy, my friend, and it has accidentally eked out a writer who bleeds on the page. Susceptible? You bet. And boiling off the stove. The wounds allow me to feel. They are sacred. I will keep them. Stirring. Boiling. Simmering. Happily cooking a disaster with chocolate mud and memories......

The only man who ever appreciated my marvelous cuisine was my grandfather. He sat in pressed pants, a button up shirt and tie on the hard-swept dirt floor of my play kitchen behind the garage. He said my mud pies and tea were "to die for yum yum" and I pretended not to notice that he was really eating tiny little pastries my grandmother had slipped in the playhouse door so he could tell the truth to his culinarily challenged granddaughter....who adored him.

The feeling was forever mutual. It didn't matter to him that I was a mush mess. He loved my mush.

Flaws, mudcake indigestions and silly musings of a 12-year-old who thought she was writing a “novel” in her bedroom at night - he gobbled up all of me. He made me believe that I could do anything. And he had the courage to be vulnerable even when he might end up with mud pies in his stomach.

I don't need to find someone who loves my mush.

I need to wholeheartedly love my own mush.
Such has been my struggle with vulnerability. It is the brutal fear of exposing yourself to hurt when you know damn well if you don't you will die. And so you fall. You get up. You fall. You get up. You make more messes. More pies.

Again. You drink tea laced with dust.
And you say “to die for yum yum....”


Copyright © 2008 Mimi Lenox. All Rights Reserved.