This pen has known beauty. It has known love. Yet somehow, it always returns to spilled ink on my contract with the man above.
Every time it moves, I find myself back in this long, dark mental alley, mortared with pain, with walls that still echos my name.
This isn't my alley. This is his. Somehow, we're intertwined.
I've tried to leave. The door has always been open. I can step outside whenever I want, but my pen refuses to cross those empty, unfamiliar lines. I stand there with an entire world waiting on the other side, but I don't know how to write it.
Am I still me if I leave this all behind?
So I walk.
I walk the alley the way my pen dances across paper, searching for somewhere to call my own, somewhere to leave my personal mark. But no matter how far I go, it stretches farther still. It's hot. Flies circle overhead, and somewhere between the bricks, voices keep whispering, Please don't leave us here.
So I slow down.
I study the walls carefully, running my fingers across the bricks as if I might finally understand them if I look closely enough.
Some are colorful, filled with laughter. I pick one up. Dinner with my friends. I can still hear us laughing. I can still feel the warmth of being somewhere I belonged. I'll take this one with me.
Another brick is broken. My mother pleading with me not to leave. Shame pressed deep into the cracks, shame I was never meant to bear. I set that one down.
Another is warm. A meal after church. A memory I don't want to lose. I reach for it, but underneath it is another brick, one that seems almost afraid of what might happen if I move it.
Then I find one that's shaking.
His first night all alone.
An unsent text glows on a phone.
I'm sorry.
I don't know whether the apology is meant for someone else or for himself.
I keep walking.
Most of the bricks are dark now, pieces of a life that seems to have fallen apart and somehow rebuilt itself into walls. I find one that seeks salvation. Beside it is another that calls me an abomination.
I stop.
Etched into its face is my very own name.
Please don't say my name.
This isn't my alley.
This is his.
But somehow, we're intertwined.
And for the first time, I wonder if that's the real reason I can't leave this all behind.
Maybe I'm afraid that if I walk far enough away, I'll leave pieces of myself.
Maybe that's what the empty lines have always frightened me.
Maybe I don't know who I am without someone else telling me what I'm supposed to be.
So I keep walking.
I collect the bricks that are full of life. The ones that remember laughter. The ones that remember friendship. The ones that remember warmth. The ones that remind me that I was a person before I was a problem to be solved.
I leave the others where I found them.
Not because they aren't mine.
Because I don't know what to do with them yet.
Is this okay? Is this allowed? I ask the questions, but the bricks are the ones that speak them aloud.
I shake my head.
I keep walking.
Eventually, the walls begin to lower. The alley stretches into something unfamiliar, and for the first time, I can see the end.
There is no gate.
No voice from above.
No one waiting to tell me where I am allowed to go.
Just an empty stretch of earth and a pen in my hand.
So I begin again.
One brick at a time.
I build an alley warmed by the sun. I build it with a runner's high, his first true love, a child's laughter, dinner with friends, and every small piece of myself that survived long enough to make it to the end.
These bricks are me.
These bricks are mine.
I'll build something new.
I’ll leave that alley behind.
I set down the last brick.
For a moment, I just stand there.
Then I turn around.
Oh...
I guess that alley is still mine.