I need to write again.

I need to write like my life depends on it. 

Pour my soul out, words splashing dark against bright white paper, carrying my life, my hope, my love, my heartache. 

I need to write until my hands cramp and my mind stops reeling. Only by telling these stories, mixing memory, fact and fiction, (perception, perhaps,) can my mind be settled and my heart calm and if I'm lucky I can sleep.

I need to write in run on sentences that link words, ideas, sprouting like cells of Spirulina on a slide, spiraling out into a larger dreamscape, ethereal yet still rooted to the Earth. 

I need to cast these letters and words out into the works for all to see -- to make them REAL -- as if to somehow justify the thoughts reeling though my mind. 

Is this world in my mind any reflection of reality? 

Does that matter?

Do I care? 

What of wearing my heart on my sleeve? Is being baring all to the world, without hinting at what is fiction or fact dishonest? Is it safe? 

Part of me, admittedly a part which grows smaller as I grow up, wants to take all my words, all my stories, all my passion and hide it in a box at the back o the closet, like some secret cache of treasure I can leaf though on sleepless nights, holding up to the light to proclaim its value, if only to me. (My precious.) 

A bigger part wonders if, by casting my thoughts to the world like some message in a bottle, I'm simultaneously calling for help and hoping to help some kindred spirit, who's own messages are cast out to drift in the minutia that is the Internet.

I don't need the whole world to care, or see, or recognize what I sometime think if as unadulterated brilliance and at other times dismiss as absolutely banal rubbish. 

I believe this need to write, to be heard, to express emotion and tell stories and hope to inspire is a perfectly normal, and exquisitely human phenomenon. 

I only hope it doesn't come to bite me in the ass some day.