What happens when you love the words but not the way they fall out? 

My mouth is a chasm as I scroll through the jagged lines on the page. Typed Sans Serif font overwrought from crisp highlights, drowning my words in bright yellow. Times New Roman commentary in the margins. Straight-laced and cruel. Like schoolboys jostling me on the playground when I tried to join them, jeering at me to reach for the next monkey bar, kicking my feet as I dangled there. 

Could this really happen? In Times New Roman it could not, not in the way I was taught to tie my shoes, tuck one string beneath the other and drag them apart. Rabbit ear or maybe it was rabbit hole, losing myself in the motion before I forgot the image in its entirety. I don’t think I could explain how to do it anymore. 
Husband comes to hover over me, and I feel my shoulders curl in before I even have the words to register him. His shadow blankets the desk as I click the red X in the corner of the screen. What are you working on? He asks but doesn’t have to. Something new, I hope. 

He doesn’t like my story. He thinks it's too tragic, too dramatic. Like a soap opera. But the last draft was too boring, he says. So, I’m keeping this one to myself. (Myself and the omniscient presence exchanged over email.)

Husband says I should stop. My desk is littered with torn journal pages, plot maps sketched on the horizon line of the notebook paper. I have every color pen, but they all bleed together as I glance away, the way that life tends to bleed together from a distance. 
I write fiction to distance myself from reality, but here it comes, seeping into my sentences, sending an itch from my brain down my spine to my spinster hands. Weaving fabricated truths. Criss-cross Chinese jump rope, except it's all tangled and I’m caught in the web of my own motion. I’m going to get it right this time. I hear the words tumble away from me, self-preservation alone binding them together.

I fell in love with metaphor before I met him, and he told me to write a poem. He told me to write a poem about him. He tried to drag the words from my mouth, fragment by tattered fragment. My lacy cursive print strung out in knots. He hated the words, but they were lost to me once they left my head. I can only write what I feel, and maybe that’s why it hurts to see it shredded this way. When his shadow recedes, I linger over MicrosoftWord before clicking on the icon again, as if a simple refresh could silence the voice in the margins.

Could this really happen? In a world populated by myths wrapped in the solace of truth, maybe it could. On the page, I see a young girl cowering beneath a shadowed hand. I see her clutch onto words and a tattered spider stuffed animal, legs spread and unraveling string by string. I see her clutching onto the Serif font as lingering eyes hover over the document. As they try to kick her from her place. I highlight the text and watch the landslide of paragraphs drown in a muted blue. I backspace. I didn’t like the story much, anyway. It has a hopeless sort of tone- it doubts itself mid-sentence- it takes away far more than it could ever give. But I wonder if I am fated to rewrite it again and again.  

What happens when you hate the words but are afraid to let them go?