A moment without words

I said something online the other day.
Not a dramatic cry, just a quiet truth.
“I haven’t written a poem in two weeks. I think my poetry is broken.”

Someone replied,
“Two weeks? I’ve gone decades.”

It was meant lightly, I think. But still, it landed wrong.
As if pain only counts when it spans years.
As if my silence needed to be longer to be valid.
As if absence is a contest, and I hadn’t earned my discomfort yet.

But two weeks is a long time for me.
I started writing in 2012. Not because I wanted to be a writer,
but because something inside me needed a place to land.
Poetry only arrived later, around 2015.
It came quietly at first, then in waves I never saw coming.
It wasn’t something I learned. It was something I became.

I don’t write when life allows.
I write while life is happening.
Between teaching preschool and raising three teenagers.
Between school lunches and car rides and emptying the dishwasher.
Writing isn’t separate from my real world.
It is my real world. It’s how I stay connected to myself.

So when the words stop, even for two weeks, I notice.
Not because I’m dramatic.
Not because I expect sympathy.
But because I know what the absence of poetry means.
It means I’m not looking at the world the way I usually do.
It means I’ve stopped noticing, stopped breathing deeply,
stopped seeing the edges of things.
It means I’m tired. Too tired to open the door to that part of myself.

And I’ve learned that tiredness doesn’t always look like rest.
Sometimes, it looks like silence.

This isn’t about comparison.
It’s not about who struggled more or who paused longer.
It’s about how quick we are to dismiss one another’s rhythm.
To measure each other’s stillness without knowing what it costs.

I’ve never put writing aside.
Not for marriage.
Not for motherhood.
Not for jobs or stress or survival.
Writing has always been a part of me, woven into every version of my adult life.

And when it slips away, even briefly, I feel it.

But the words always return.
As soon as I notice they’re gone,
they come back in a different shape.
They erase the silence
and fill the emptiness they left behind.