by Stacia Elizabeth Whitbeck

Created on: November 10, 2010

Raised by the afterthoughts of an intolerant mother, my voice faded into the shadows. Television was forbidden, as were video games. Twenty acres of field and forest were my playmates and the only conversations to be had were among the bullfrogs that lived in the pond.

My voice was silenced with piercing glances, the kind that can stop a bird in mid-flight, but my words would not be still. They whispered to me in the night as I struggled to get warm in my chilled room. Ideas that Momma deemed ridiculous insisted on taking shape, and my mind became a kaleidoscope of unsaid words.

I became a writer. I wrote letters to Momma, telling her how I loved the wild strawberries that grew every year, and the way the sky opens wide right before it rains. Momma didn’t know I was a writer and scoffed at my manuscripts. She said I was wasting paper and to do something constructive, so I made a book from construction paper and kept it under my bed. When the ideas came to wake me, I reached for my homemade novel and wrote them down.

“Look, Momma.” I stood near my mother’s chair in the kitchen.

“What is that?”

I held out my novel filled with colorful pages.

“It’s constructive.”

Momma stared at me for a moment.

“Do not call me ‘Momma’. It makes you sound like a blithering idiot.”

I didn’t know what blithering meant, but I knew what an idiot was, so a blithering one must be really bad. I bit my nail and stared back.

“I wrote you a story.”

Momma sighed. A long, stormy sigh.

“I thought I told you not to waste paper like this.” The tone in Momma’s voice caused something to leak out inside of me.

“It’s construction paper, like you said.”

Momma’s icy stare continued as I shrank into the floor. I took my book and went to find solace in the field where the wildflowers greeted me.

As I grew older, words became my companions. I played with them, arranging them on a page as if they were colors from a palate. Piles of books were devoured to find new words, ones that popped from the paper. I collected words, the ones that people leave unsaid, big ones that sound like homework and pretty ones that jingle in your mouth. I loved them and they smiled at me from their paragraphs.

Still hesitant to voice my words, I continued writing throughout high-school and college. I learned to craft concise letters to offer up to teachers and deans when I felt a wrong doing had been committed. I wrote my opinions in the form of poetry and expression. Writing became my link to the people around me, and to the world outside. I spent many leisurely evenings at my favorite café in Berkeley, watching people from over my book. I described them in prose, and gave them a new persona with descriptive sentences.

Those closest to me warned that writers don’t get paid until they get published. Get a real job, they told me. I put my words away, packed them in a box along with the ugly things Momma said and went to work. I cut hair while composing a poem about the woman in my chair. I likened her face to the skin of perishing apple while she chattered about something inane. I served burgers and fries to busy people who had real jobs, like me, wondering what the burger thought as it neared a gaping mouth. I tuned out the rude, annoying gum-popping shoppers in my checkout line as I invented a plot in which the tomatoes in produce spawn poisonous thorns.

My words seeped from the box I hid them in, they would not be ignored. Ten years ago, after my shift at a gas station, I went home. I have been writing ever since because I have to. I don’t know how to do anything else.

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