30 Days 30 Stories, Installment 24, The Psalms

The day his mother died was the first day it happened. In his sad reflection, the tears upon his childish face, a pencil near his hand seemed to come into it of its own accord, and in his little five star spiral bound notebook, he wrote the lines of love and longing and pain that haunted him somewhere deep within. He really wasn't aware of the words, until they rushed out, like flames, onto the page, so many many words, repetitions and swirls of them, unlike anything he had read or seen. He hid his notebook underneath his mattress and went to school, but at night he picked out the worn pages again, looking at them, longingly, and the love they evoked. Because at those moments, he didn't feel anything at all.
The next time he experienced that feeling was the day that he lost the baseball match for the school team. He wanted to leave the team altogether; never wonderful at sports, he had ruined it all. The pentel pen lay by his bedside, left over from some plane-drawing project he had begun before sleep. And out of him again, mountains and rivers of words. Ashamed, he closed the notebook, exhausted by emotion.
He remembered clearly the times when it didn't seem to happen, too. The moments when Cherry didn't want to go to prom with him, the moments when all he wanted was to swim but the pool wouldn't let him in without permission, and his father, petrified now of water, wouldn't allow it. He remembered the moments when he dressed in black with his friends and thought it would be cool if he could write 'poetry' to some girl. But at these times, the darkling waters never took him, and he couldn't summon the words for the moments, for the feelings he felt. They were confused and angry and anxious, and they weren't for writing.
He went to university, and experienced those parts of life we never think we're going to; the parts that aren't as pretty as they should be, and the parts that are much more so.
When he was 27 he met a young man, a man who was his friend and like his brother. And when he sat on his bed in his apartment that night, the fountain pen of his last sojourn to the bookstore by his hand, he grasped it suddenly, and in a gasping moment of discovery, the waters of his soul broke again.
Darkness and light, altogether. And realization.
picture, Lucy Hennessy "Little Boy Lost"