When words are lost.

Recently I have lacked words. They seem to be so far from me. Somehow, somewhere I have stopped thinking words. Words feel insufficent. I have also stopped praying in words. My conversations with God have moved away from the spoken, from the thought and into a place of depth of emotion, of great feeling. My prayers have become the act of lifting myself, my feelings, fears, desires, hopes, dreams, of taking my state of being and lifting that to God. I feel more drawn into a mystery than anything else. Like the moment at communion where the host is lifted up, Christ present, Christ given, Christ broken. Words cannot describe the depth of that moment, the way it touches the soul cannot be put into words. The giving of salvation, redemption, the gift of grace manifest as the presence of God is more visible than anything else. My heart feels like it will burst within my chest at the anticipation of heaven. How can I wait another moment to be with the one who I love more than any lover, and who loves me the same?

Then, slowly, I fall to earth, I fall back into the pain of what is now. I am drawn away from the mystery, forgetting the beauty and love and stillness. I lack the strength to stay in that place. The pain ever more real.

Maybe it is time to be silent. To learn stillness.

On Love

It seems to me that I have a choice to make.

Pain is often a tool that teaches us what not to do. When you touch something that is too hot, it hurts, the pain tells you not to touch it again. The synapses in our body are clever like that, teaching us to respond.

I am in pain, and if I were to purposefully avoid this pain again, which I have experienced again and again over the last few years I would have to close my heart to the world. I would have to not love as deeply, as much, I would have to stop being open and love. I would have to learn how not to love the way I love. I would have to learn how to be someone other than me. The world tells me to do this, the people around me tell me to do this, they see me grieve, they see my tears and they tell me that I need to find another way, a way to stop caring so much about everyone (that isn't how they say it, but that is what it would be).

God has given me a gift in how I love.

You, whoever you are reading this (even if we've never met), I love you, because you are, you exist, you are a human being made in God's image. You are beautiful and I love you, because you are. I'm not sure how this is possible because I look around me and no one else seems to have that (the capacity to love even the stranger they've never met without knowing anything about them). When I get to know someone that love grows, deeper and deeper, and it is wonderful, to know a person, even just a little. I, when I used to have really horrible days, would walk down the street trying not to cry, then I would see someone, or walk onto a bus and I would smile, at the people who passed me by, at the bus drivers (they knew me as the smiling girl with the 'cello), because by smiling at someone I could share something of that love, of that care.

The love I have for people, for each individual in this world is huge, sometimes I barely think I can love as much as I do. When I was a child I really hated the fact that I could not know everyone in the world, because I wanted to know them, I wanted to love them better. For years I would have to remind myself that "lots of love" was not an appropriate way to end every letter I wrote... because that's what I wanted to write, because that is what I felt.

Over the years I have tried to hold back, hold back from loving, to be socially appropriate, to be acceptable, I think it's actually harder for me to live like that, it is far more difficult to try not to care, not to love. To remind myself, it's not okay to love as freely as I love, to try to cut myself off from it. It's as if I've amputated a limb, and for the last year of so I've been living like that. I've been living trying not to love, how I love. Yet by doing that, I've stopped being able to feel how much God loves me. I know that sounds odd, but for years I felt God's love surround me, then I cut myself off from that and I almost killed myself, but was rescued by God's love breaking back into my life and I started loving again. I think that's what I've had to do. God's love in my life is a real presence, is something I sense and hold in my heart, and know, and feel in every moment, except for those few years, and this last year. Cutting myself off was something very much influenced by my peers telling me, shouting at me, throwing at me, beating at me how much they hated me, it was that that did it. It was memories of that coming back that meant that I could cut myself off from that much love this year.

But enough. Enough. I cannot live like that, I cannot live without loving from the depths of my heart, all of humanity, I cannot not love you.

See the thing is, I'm sitting here, a few days away from another funeral, a funeral for someone I loved deeply.

Love like this, it is agony, it is heart ache, it is heart break. It is the most painful thing I have ever known (and I once picked up a stainless steel saucepan at 400°F), and I will cry, and I will weep. But every second of the pain is worth it. I can't learn how not to love, unless I want cut myself off from who I am, cut myself off from knowing the love of God as a sure presence in my life. That I cannot do. I could not live with that betrayal of myself, that betrayal of God and who He made me to be and this gift he gave me.

This post was going to be about how I work out how to change so the pain doesn't hurt so much and how to deal with the pain, but instead, look what happened?

So let me finish by saying. I LOVE YOU.

Lots of love,

Emma xxx

I'm sitting here with an essay that needs urgent attention, hair that needs washing, a kitchen that needs tidying and... I'm just sitting here. The sun shinning on my face, listening to Savage Garden's Affirmation and Declaration the same song just played twice - the live version then the studio, 23 songs on shuffle and they follow one another.

I'm not doing anything right now and there are many things I need to do. I look around at all the things the intentions in this room and I start asking myself, 'what am I scared of?' because it is fear that is keeping me here, keeping me from motivation, from action. I look at the shelves and shelves of books and think about how many I want to read, knowing full well that if I sat down and started reading them it wouldn't take me long and I'd enjoy it. But I'm too scared... too scared to read...what!?!

Suddenly the answer comes to me, I'm scared of being me. My memories run back to summer holidays spent reading, dreaming, writing. The days I dedicated to that, that is who I am. Yet that girl was tortured and hated. I'm scared of the consequences of being myself. Yet right now. Right now I can be that girl, I need to be that girl, the girl who reads and dreams and writes and doesn't give a damn about the abuse she's suffer for it, because right now I'm not going to suffer the abuse from it. Not from the wonderful and lovely people around me who will be right there with me, the people who will help me dream, who I can talk ideas with. Who will never shoot me down for existing. The memories are coming back, but there is nothing I can do about that except learn not to hate myself for how I was treated.

Rambling thoughts.

I stood and stared into the sea and I heard God speak and it baffled me. Yet I knew in that moment that there was hope, there was future, that standing there at the edge of the sea was what I was meant to be doing at that moment of my life.

The first time someone I loved left me I was 8, my best friend moved to the other side of the country and I didn't see him for a year. I spoke to him every day, I cried myself to sleep, I started wondering if it wouldn't be better if I died because then I could be with God and this would be over. On two occasions I got close to trying to kill myself, in those moments God stopped me, images came into my mind of me lying on the kitchen floor dead and how my parents would react and I knew I couldn't do that to them. It was like my world had fallen apart. Though then was still a chance, I planned the journey down to visit him, I knew which trains I had to get, where the changes were, I worked out how to get into London and which train to get out, which boat to catch when I got to Penzance.

You see, he was one of the people who got me through the day, who kept me going. He wasn't like the girls who would be my friend one day then hate me the next, he wasn't going to turn around and stab me in the back, him being around made the rest bearable. When the stones came hurtling down the clay track behind me, I ignored it, I forced it out of my mind. I got through to the morning because then I get to see T again and I'd forget about everyone else, about how much they hurt me. They didn't stop though, every chance they got for ten years. Then this grief stricken girl goes home because someone has died again and they vandalise the car they see her driving.

In 2008 I went home four times, each because someone had died, twice they wrecked the car. Then somehow last summer I thought I was strong enough to take it on. I didn't see them, they weren't there. Maybe they've all been locked up or left, maybe it's safe now.

No, it's never safe. Not there, each place is a memory. I remember the days I hid in my room away from the window scared if they saw me they'd throw a brick through it. The days I didn't want to leave the house because there was no route where I was certain I would avoid them. The abuse I would get between the bus stop and my house if I went out. The jeers from the bastards who yelled those insults at me for the best part of the 14 years I was bullied for.

I have good memories of that place but I don't know where they are. I can't find them. Maybe the days I spent down in Angie's book shop lost in a world of fantasy and adventure. Walks with Emlyn round the meadows.

Right now it is so easy to blame myself, to come up with some reason why it's my fault, my fault that they never stopped hurting me, my fault that everyone died. These memories are coming back, the moments that part of me knew had happened, but the moments I didn't remember before. At least now I know where those mysterious bruises came from... ontop of the pain, the memories, over and above that is how much I loved Adam, how much it would all be bearable if I could once more look into his eyes and rest my head upon his shoulder.

I need to find another way out. I need to find a way to do this work I want and need to do, all of this, I need to find a way to live without this taking over. For the last few days I've been wanting to rewind to before this summer, to change it so I didn't go back. I was so happy, so full of joy, so alive, nothing could contain my happiness for just being alive. Then my heart broke again, for that little girl who was powerless to do anything else, and for Adam. I feel like a shadow that's bleeding and I want this over. I want this to end more than anything.

I want to go back to the girl that can take on the world. Who has hope and happiness and love.

I dreamt last night of a man I have loved and still love, it would be easier for that love to die with death, but it still lives, yet he does not and it burns me up.

This is not a short journey, it is not a quick moment that passes like the seasons, it is slow and it is painful, and I must find a way to live. A way to be without the agony that encompasses me, that makes me dread the sleep that I need so desperately, this life is something new.

How Morwenna Happened

I'm sitting here trying not to look at the screen I'm typing onto because my head decided half way through my lecture this morning that it wanted to have a migraine, but then my head was too alive to sleep and so I'm sat here typing.

I've put together a playlist with the songs I listened to one spring, round about Easter, March 2003, David Bowie, Daniel Bedingfield and Alanis Morisette, these songs aren't about how good or bad the music is, but about the memories that flood back. I sat curled up in the corner of my bedroom, this CD playing reading Guy Gavriel Kay's Fionavar Tapestry and after three days of reading I walked down to Angie's bookshop and looked through the shelves for something I wanted to read and found nothing. What I needed was something that would jump into my hand and keep me gripped hour after hour. So I sat down and looked through University and College websites, deciding on where I wanted to go. Then with nothing else to do an idea came to mind.

An idea that changed my life.

"I've been writing short stories, but I'm tired of these short stories, they don't go anywhere, and I can't find anything I want to read. Why don't I write something? More than a short story? A story that I want to read. What's stopping me? All these ideas running through my head. Right, okay, I'll write a book."

I thought of names, I thought of places, I couldn't work out surnames so I opened the phonebook at random pages and used the names that stood out. I set it in Cambridge and on the Cornish coast, and an island and... started with seven characters and now have over thirty....

There were two people I told about the stories that I wrote, as I sat day after day with a pen and a book and then a computer and pages and pages and files and files and all of this. Two people I would share those stories with as they sat with me. One has been suffering from ME for 7 years, the other is dead.

My manuscript exists, the story unreadable because of the parts that I knew and forgot to write, the writing terrible and in need of rewriting, but the ideas are wonderful and fill me with joy, there are parts of it I cannot read without crying both with sadness and happiness. It is a wonderful story, and I want to finish it, to give to Tamsin and in memory of Adam. I want it written perfectly, beautiful and printed, bound, I want it like that. For them and for myself, to remind me of what I have done with this life, what I am capable of and the things that I truly love.

The battle tonight, every night, is that I lost someone, someone who got me through being a depressed teenager, someone who was a part of that in a positive way, but that is when he was a part of my life.

So dragging myself through the memories of him, also drags me through the memories of who I was. Though that is more emotive than rational. I feel who I was.

Listen now:

You are not the child who lives in fear of the morning, tomorrow you do not have to walk to the bus stop and have abuse yelled at you, you do not have to get on the bus and face the glances thrown at you by the girl who'll be punching you in the face on Thursday, there will be no one punching you in the face on Thursday, there will be no one to graffiti your work, there will be no one to steal your things as soon as you put them down on a desk, there will be no one hitting you over the head on Friday morning, there will be no one screaming you down, you do not have to fight to get your jacket back, because no one is going to steal your jacket, you do not have to run away from the places you want to be because there won't be people there treating you like you don't deserve to exist, there will be no one throwing rubbish at you on the bus, there will be no one throwing stones at you as you walk home from school, or leave the house to clear your head. There will be no one to bring you down and make you feel ashamed of existing.

You have a right to live, you have a right to life, you've endured this much.

You are allowed to live! Its hard to know that when again and again they told you you weren't, but they were wrong, and they are not here.