writing... or not

I haven't written anything in forever... literally years. For a while, I told myself that life was so good, I just wanted to be in it... to enjoy it. For a long while after that, I didn't have to tell myself anything at all, because I stopped thinking about it. I stopped missing it. Then, things went to shit, as they will... actually, THING went to shit. Everything else stayed great... everything else was great before, too. In the bad time. So, I did what I do... I sat down to write. And then I remembered why I really quit. Sure things were good. And I was enjoying it. Living in the moment and all that. But that wasn't what stopped me... because I can enjoy life, and live life, and still write. I quit because I can't dance... I quit because the things I didn't know how to write about, kept popping up, and I kept trying to dance around them, and I kept falling right into them... and so I would delete, and delete, and stare at the keyboard, and delete again. I would write it down, and overcome with guilt and shame, and the hugeness of the secrets, I would delete it all. These things weren't for sharing. They were too big, too horrible... they were things that I could only speak with my love about in whispers, even though we were alone in our home. Things that I didn't want others to know. Shit, things I didn't even want to know. Something happened to these things... their badness, their secretness, their shame, made them balloon up in size. I tiptoed around them, pretending they didn't exist, and they grew. I shoved them into a corner, in reality and in my mind. and they grew. I made up Voldemort type nicknames for them "the things that we don't speak of"... " the bad times"... and they grew. Then the state came in, and they found somewhere else for my son to live... somewhere that it was safer for all of us... and those things started shrinking... they got normal size... and then even smaller, like driving away from a skyscraper and watching it shrink and shrink until you can pinch it between your fingers. But when I sat down to write, my brain would do this thing... it would whisper to me... 'hey... do you know what we haven't talked about? what we can't talk about? lets talk about that..." and for a while I tried to just do it... just put it on paper, but I always deleted it, because I couldn't say the words. I can't say the words. Not where other people might see them. They might judge him. And more selfishly, they might judge me. They might realize that I'm a terrible person, or see my damaged child and wonder what I did wrong. So I write, and delete, write and delete. Hey... at least I'm writing.