Day after day, the girl pasted pieces of her heart into the brown paper journal. She loved the time she spent with her heart and her journal, baring it all to the lined pages. She played with the rubber cement she applied, pulling off fingerprint after fingerprint. She smoothed down the edges of the bits of her tender heart she placed so gingerly onto the severed trees.

Every now and then, she’d go back and look at the parts of her soul strewn across the pages, smiling at a past thought, frowning at a past demon. All in all, you were written within the pages of this journal and that’s what made her happy.

Something was amiss today, as she came down for breakfast and sat sullenly at the table. The book she always had by her side (as if her imaginary friend was trapped within) was not there. She answered none of our questions; she parried our interrogations rather well with her silence.

And later in the day, as the sky grew pink with its snowy potential, we sat on the front porch smoking cigars and talking in hushed voices as to not disturb her. She sat in the corner of the yard with her once-treasured papers, weeping over the heartache contained within her human heart. The pages apparently no longer meant anything to her.

I nudged my neighbor and we watched her set the journal afire with a single match. The wind whispered loudly, nearly extinguishing the match, but Fate was intertwined with my little girl that day as the inner pages suddenly caught fire and burned quickly. She sobbed and sobbed at her heart blowing away as ashes on the cold breeze. The thicker paper cover was slower to light and still remained when all of the insides had burned into the atmosphere.

She spoke words of wisdom to us (far beyond her years) as she brushed by with only the cover left: “This paper shell is all that remains of my heart; the insides are nothing but ash.”

She dropped it at our feet and sulked inside to sleep again.

It would be years before my angel drew near to the One who could restore her heart.

Sometimes, the words just don't come out.

There are emotions and frustrations brewing within. There is a storm of epic proportions - one that can lift a 252 ton (that's 500,000 pounds) rock from the bottom of the ocean to the edge of the shoreline cliffs - that is causing a deadly rise and fall within.

Isolation and lack of comfortability consistently bring issues to the surface I had either long forgotten or never known.

So I sit, my cursor blinking, trying to compose my thoughts into coherent poetry to express this storm. But the storm will not be described. It will not be quelled by an outpouring of wind or rain. The storm refuses to weaken by such understanding, but instead will smirk and strengthen by repeatedly regurgitating the emotion(s) on which it feeds.

I think about him, multiple hims.
I think about me.
I think about the patterns, the compositions of my relationships.
I think about identity.
I think about God.

I wonder how He is capable of explaining my world in more clear terms (or probably less clear, knowing Jesus).
I wonder how I can change behaviours, even if only mental.
I wonder how relationships form and how they are destroyed.
I wonder how I relate to people.
I wonder at being isolated, forever.

To say I feel anguish would be inaccurate; it is far more similar to confusion, to reaching into a murky ocean and wondering what might be swimming amongst the coral or sand along the bottom.

Who Am I, and Why do I feel this way?