Laboring - Camilla Basham

As a child I was silent, overly sensitive, insecure, secretive. Words scarcely left my mouth, not even when prodded by inquiring adults. However, a constant internal narrative bounced around my brain. At times I wanted to speak, only to find the words stuck in my throat where I would swallow them down like medicine. I was choking to give birth to the thoughts in my head, but they would arrive to my lips stillborn.

When Sister Claire instructed me to stand before class and tell the students what my father did for a living, I stared at my second hand Mary Janes and rolled down white socks with the lace trim. I spit out in a mousy whisper, “He writes on paper.” “Oh, so he’s a writer?” she said. I nodded my head to the giggling class. I went home and cried in my room. I decided silence was indeed the best option.

Before bed I secretly took a yellow legal pad and writing pen from my dad’s desk and propped myself up on my bed behind closed doors. I thought if I could detour the thoughts in my brain right past my mouth and channel them into my twitching fingers maybe they would come out through my fingertips.

I can still remember the feeling of that tiny metal ball point, drenched in indigo, as it touched the yellow surface: the way the ball glided across the page effortlessly, the way the paper absorbed the ink, like a man dying of thirst. Because it was a secret and no one else would ever read it, I wrote without punctuation, capitulation or reservation. I wrote, and I cried and I laughed at the sweet release of everything that had been trapped inside: the labor pains finally ending in sweet release and giving birth to a life long passion.