Awakening

 Words used to be my identity. They were my superpower to mold and shape to fit any place I needed them. With words, I could hone a weapon or a shield, a starlit sky or a roof to block out the elements, a place of love or hate, a cage or freedom at its finest. Words were everything until they weren't. Until I succumbed to the routine of mediocrity that stripped me of them. Now what I have are ruins of all that I used to be and all that I could have been.

  It'd be easy to say someone else tricked me, and trapped me in a wordless and colorless demise. But I did it to myself. I made this prison with unwritten and unspoken words and then I hid the key that faded along with any potential I might have had. I made this grave of broken dreams and tainted memories and then I buried myself with the falsity and belief that I needed someone else to rescue me. Always the damsel never the knight, the picket-fenced-in lady hidden by the pretenses that society told her. The truth is often hard and vicious when you're used to deception; We often buy it with the pain of grand mistakes and the soul-bound blood as it leaks from the wounds of our own making. The truth is that I am my captor just as much as I am the captive. I am the villain that causes the catalyst of change in my narrative, but that also makes me the hero that saves me from the flames of dying youth. 

  I know the truth but the feel and sound of freedom are fading with the hourglass of time and the bars thicken every moment I do nothing. I know the truth of my capability, but now that my key is missing, how do I set myself free? When words have abandoned me, what do I have left to mold? What do I have left to offer the world I let shut me out and forget me? Even if I could shape a pin to pick the lock, would I be able to leave? I've caught glimpses of the real me just out of my reach, I could even convince myself that I was set free. Yet my self-made prison has become my home for the last 20 years, what would I be in a life I never knew I had? It's terrifying that I don't know the landscape I'd be walking into, but it's far more debilitating staying stuck. I have to get out before all that's left is iron bars and a ghost who never let herself live. 

I call upon the words that wrote the fabric of my existence, the words I used to have, and the words that are yet to be mine. I call the unspoken dreams and the dead affirmations to rise from the grave of lies in which they sit. All that I am is mine for the winning, all that I have is my mind and a newfound determination to become. And with it all, I break this lock that can no longer hold me back and rip the hinges off my cage that shall no longer keep me bound. With my reawakened sense of being, I now step into the wild unknown, ready to shape the world into my kingdom.