How can we write our broken-heartedness?

In which I try to write about and despite and through the mud and towards togetherness

I wasn’t going to write this post today. I had something else up my sleeve, more or less drafted.

But I’m sitting here at my desk, with the wind wailing and keening in the narrow gap between my house and nextdoor and the words I was going to send out suddenly seem all wrong.

The rain is running down the window behind my screen and I’m thinking about some photographs I saw yesterday, posted by my friend, who has been volunteering for many months now in Gaza. Pictures of plastic sheets draped over salvaged metal, and miles and miles of thick, orange mud. The photographs included images of objects abandoned in the mud: an empty medicine bottle, a broken bowl, a child's shoe with the sole peeling off.

I can still see the mud. I can feel it under my fingernails and in my throat. I can’t stop seeing and feeling it.

As I keep writing this, I’m becoming self-conscious. You probably don’t want mud in your inbox today. Maybe instead, you would have much preferred my meticulously crafted post on how to ask for and offer feedback.

Life is hard enough, right now. Who am I to send you mud?

This is what we do, isn’t it, with our writing? There is the writing and then, just beneath it, all the misshapen thoughts about the writing; the heavy, claggy, muddy stuff that is so difficult to push through; the second-guessing, the fear of being selfish or sentimental, the projection of ourselves into the bodies of our imagined readers.

Let’s call this stuff the mud-text.