Crawling words and a heartbeat bill

The words forgive me. It does not matter if it has been days, months, or years. I go to a blank page and that’s where movement happens.

I am shifted from being alone in my body to being in my body. My toes suddenly don’t feel so skeptical of where I will be taking them in this life and my fingers agree to work with me. The words assure all of me that being together in this body is the best place to be.

And truthfully, my words forgive other people. I chronicle that childhood thing or the first guy I slept with in college and I am suddenly not so mad, not so hurt. My body needs someone to take the anger out of it. To remove it from the lining of my stomach and put it somewhere else.

That’s what the words do when I let them.

When I filter where the words go, who they forgive be it me or someone else, when I try to make them take perfect shape with smooth corners, they hold on to the ends of my fingers and I can not shake them off.

Like small ants, they crawl up my arms frantically searching for where they came from. They weren’t ready to leave me yet, not in this false way.

I suppose I love the words. I have never been a language expert and grammatical errors burn a hole into my skin but I love the words like a diabetic loves insulin. I need them to keep living, not in the breathing or staying above ground way, but in the wanting to wake up in the morning way.

My words, not the words of other people, showed me I am a person who cares about many things. For a long time, I thought I was a person who cared about nothing and my best bet was to care about the things people told me to care about.

I should care about how I look and why my jeans wrinkle behind the knee. I should care about what people do with their bodies. I should especially care about what men think of my body and how they feel about the way I think.

I suppose not caring is an act of caring. I had a dream last night that the supreme court ruled abortion to be unconstitutional and then I woke up this morning and listened to something on NPR about the Texas heartbeat bill, now law.

I care very much about the things women can’t do with their bodies and I suppose that’s why I am writing this. All of the care I have bubbles up in my dreams, in the things I see in this world, and then it finds itself here on a blank page so I can be less angry about it.

I suppose words can change the world because forgiveness does especially when it happens in the body. To remove things from ourselves, to release the words and the anger, and that thing that will take life from us, not necessarily in the dying way but in the wanting to wake up in the morning way, is the only way to stay alive.

Forgiveness does not mean I forgive you or myself for what happened now do it again. It means that the thing that did the hurting that did the taking of living is gone and we have decided it will not come back. The deciding of what can stay or return is our decision to make.

It is not the decision of the first guy you slept with in college, a white-haired man who has the power to sign legislation or those folks who post pro-life stories to Facebook.

I think those are the people who convince us that we do not care. Because when we embrace what we care about their ideals are threatened. Their ability to hold on to what they care about depends on us not finding or using or weaponizing our words and forgiveness.

I think when that bill was written it did not leave the fingers of its writers easily, because it was written out of fear with the desire to keep the holders of authentic words down. It was meant to weaponize humane bodies and to place them between living and the finding of words.