Scratches

The scratch of pen on paper - that’s what it’s all about at the end of the day, right? That’s what it’s always been about. Sometimes it’s scratches that turn into bytes, pen and paper that becoming clacking keyboard keys. Sometimes it’s someone else’s scratched out thoughts you turn to in books and blogs and memes and stories. Sometimes it’s an essay, sometimes a hurried cube drawn on the corner of a napkin, used and discarded and never thought of again. But always, permanent or ephemeral or somewhere in the long road in the middle, always it’s the scratches you turn to, to make sense of it all. Sense of the bruises and the cuts and the muddled befuddled puddle of thoughts in your soul, sense of the clouds drifting across the roiling landscape of your mind, the butterflies blossoming in your stomach, the cracks forming and freezing over and melting in your chest, the wheezing insecurity in your lungs as your heart alternates between a beat of “not enough” and “just this”.

Just some scratches, runes, hieroglyphics. That’s all there is to us.

~ Sam