Work Text:
Ever since she had discovered the endless ways in which words could come together to express the infinite beauty and endless variability of her world, Molly had felt as though poetry were a living creature contained inside of her, surging with power and desperate to escape out into the world where it could run free. The words sang in her blood, sounds dancing through her brain and across her tongue in endless shifting variation, leaving her electrified and feeling so alive she wanted to scream it to the world. She did her best to write them down and capture them as they flitted through her mind, but it was like trying to harness the wind or pin down water – even as she could feel the words hammering at her brain and screaming to be released, the moment she put pencil to paper to capture them in tangible form they fled, leaving her empty and frustrated beyond measure. And even when she did manage to produce a pale imitation of the inner poetry that filled her soul, no one took the slightest notice of what she had created. The world would not listen to her voice, did not care to hear what she had to say. No one else seemed to understand how it felt to have a universe of language exploding inside of you, no one else seemed to view the world through a lens of possibility and promise and unexplored variation. Didn’t everyone else feel this way? Didn’t everyone else go through life dreaming of the way things could be and how best to make it real? Apparently not. Dreaming could be a nice diversion from what really mattered and poetry briefly enjoyed as a fanciful waste of time, but never anything more.
And so the words were bottled up inside of her, kept safe and quiet where they could not be heard and dissected and torn to shreds by a world that was full of nothing but vicious cynicism and critique. She threw herself into her studies with single-minded determination, pursuing a tangible goal that would earn her the praise that would never be awarded to what really mattered. And when studies were finished and goals were accomplished the work began, an existence that could be measured and weighed to exacting specifications like the people she examined. It was simple, it was what she was supposed to be do, and it was killing her. Every day, the same routine repeated over and over until she had forgotten what it was like to dream. Every day, the same empty smiles given to people who did not return them, the same yawning emptiness, the same quiet desperation as the poetry died inside of her.
But then, a miracle. No, not a miracle, a man – the man who turned her world on end and brought light to a life that had been taken by slowly encroaching darkness. The man who could set every nerve in her body alight with a shy smile, who treated her like a precious object to be valued and loved no matter how plain she felt, who showed her with every touch and every whispered endearment that life was not just to be endured but lived. Even from the beginning, even when they were still dancing around each other with nervous trepidation, afraid of making one wrong move and scaring the other off as had happened so many times before, Molly knew that Martin was special. She knew almost from the very first time that he had smiled at her, eyes wide and happy and disbelieving that she was choosing to speak to him, that this man would change her life. And months later, when they were tangled together in a pile of happy and exhausted limbs and he had whispered a tender “I love you” into her ear with the gentlest sincerity, she knew that she had been right.
The words returned, stronger than ever. They exploded inside of her, billowing and flowing and pounding at the walls of her brain in their desperation to be heard. She found that she could not contain them any longer, and soon every scrap of paper in reach was covered in fragments of phrase and poetry and emotion. Paperwork at the hospital was turned in with stanzas scribbled frantically in the margins, newspapers became mosaics of sound and emotion, even napkins from takeaway containers were soon littered with the nearly incoherent fragments of poetry that battered at Molly’s brain. What had been contained for so long as a gentle trickle had erupted into a torrent of creation, and there was no controlling it any longer. She had found something, someone worth writing for, and now that she had she could not even dream of stopping.
And yet, despite the outpouring of words and feeling that Molly could not hope to stop, Martin did not know. So many years of hiding, so many rebuffed offerings and scorned attempts at creation had left a mark on Molly that was slow to heal even when faced with such a good and honest man as Martin. She hid her writing with guilty conscience and sinking heart, praying that her scraps of feeling would never be found and torn to shreds once more. Hopes and dreams were hidden away in drawers and books and piles of papers, kept from the light of day and hoarded from view where they could be seen and judged. It could not last forever of course. The time of discovery was bound to come, and when Molly came home one evening to see Martin sitting cross-legged on the floor surrounded by those familiar pieces of paper, it felt as though her world had collapsed on her in an instant. She wanted to scream, to run, to hide away from the man who had discovered her secret and become the first to read her writing in nearly twenty years.
“You wrote these?” he asked, eyes wide and voice full of wonder. Molly could not speak, could not find the words to answer him around the lump in her throat and the hammering of her heart that would certainly rattle its way out of her chest. This was her worst nightmare come to life, and now all she could do was stand and stare and feel the tears burning in her eyes as she braced herself for the familiar derision that surely was to come.
But Martin did not laugh as he read the napkin he held in his hands, nor did he sneer, or snort, or roll his eyes as any of the others had done. Instead he read with quiet fascination, mouth moving in an unconscious echo of the words before him before he looked up at her once more with a smile on his face. “This is beautiful, absolutely beautiful. Why didn’t you tell me that you were a poet, love?”
It was not until the last of her tears had been cried into a loving embrace that Molly was able to explain to a confused and distressed Martin just what his unthinking comment meant to her. And later that night, when words were traced in delicate ink onto pale skin, for the first time not scribbled in hurried shame but etched slowly and tenderly as a gift bestowed in love and honest gratitude, Molly knew what it was to be at peace.