Written, but Unsaid

Photo by Josué AS on Unsplash

“With some blue ink

a blank page

and an old six string

I bleed on paper”

As soon as I heard these lyrics, part of a newer Eric Church song, I quietly said, fuck.

Take away the guitar, the ink, and the page, replace it with a computer and a mouse, and a charger that only works part of the time, and that’s me.

I thought, YES. I bleed on paper.

Don’t I?

The song gave me goosebumps, but then I felt something pounding inside me, like a fist hitting a locked door.

Do I?

Do I bleed on paper? Really?

I don’t spend my days scratching across notebook sheets with a pencil that cracks under pressure, crumpling them, tossing them, smacking my head against an old wooden desk.

There are no ink marks on my arm from hours of work.

I don’t fall asleep on a notebook at 2 a.m. and wake up with blue smears across my face, like bruises and dark shadows.

Agonizing over the words.

Tears. Blood. Hate. Love.

Dying.

I never quite let myself split open, let words spill raw and unchecked across the screen.

I get close, really damn close. But I always stop just before I go all the way.

Because I’m scared, I’m always so goddamn scared.

A fraud.

And look, I know the ideas are coming from my head, this half-lit, broken machine, and they’re gonna land here to be read by you one way or another. And they’re always gonna be decent-ish. But they could be so much better.

My skull pulsed with loathing.

You’re a lazy, fake, pussy

And a bunch of similar sentences.

I started to wonder: What do I bleed onto? Do I bleed at all, or just pretend?

I don’t bleed Buffalo Bills Blue, or the colors of my hometown baseball team.

What do I bleed? Where do I bleed?

Desperation?

Pitiful pleading into all of your laps? Please read my shit

Greed?

Lust? Do I bleed on men? Please love me, show me your dick

Am I worth the pieces that spill out and scatter across the screen until they finally fit together somehow?

But then a word came to mind.

Passion.

Whatever the canvas, whether I’m writing it, typing it, or sticking colorful magnetic letters up my ass, I’m bleeding passion onto what I’m sharing here. I might be pissed, but it comes out in a story about fucking my neighbor. Maybe I’m sad, but my fingertips bleed happiness—a memory of my kids.

Every emotion is a passionate journey for me.

Aggression becomes sex, pain turns into laughter, and a complaint ends up as a joke about giant, bouncy tits.

Maybe one day these feelings will find their own designated places in my mind, but maybe they never will.

Maybe they keep weaving through one another, celebrating, mourning, loving, all at once, never separate, always entwined.

Yeah. I bleed passion. Everywhere.

And I’m gonna keep going, bleeding onto whatever is in my path—every day teaching myself to be harder, heavier, honest, real.

---

Merry Whatever,

❤️—GC

Who else is depressed as fffuuuucccccckkkkkkkkk?