Is there a hidden story lurking in your heart?
Does it squirm within you, like the North Wind trapped under a glass, howling to be released? Perhaps it is quieter, smaller. A lonely child tapping behind a closed door.
It is the story you’re afraid to tell. An unspoken, dark-veined soliloquy composed of dying matter, the ribs of an old life. Or the vivid but insubstantial ghost of what if that haunts the folding of laundry or a grey commute to work.
Perhaps your only awareness of this hidden story comes from the invisible flip of its pages, a chill draught brushing your skin, snuffing out a peace that only seconds ago came so easily. You call it a strange mood, a sudden, uncomfortable melancholy to be shrugged off as a spider is shaken from the bedclothes.
Superstitious girls at my school used to say these shivers meant someone had walked over your grave. What if that someone was your shadow? For many years its crooked hand has filled many pages with cramped words, scribing a Book of Shadows in the dark.
And it wants to attract the attention of the only reader who matters.
I know there is a hidden story within me, several probably. I imagine them sprouting like weeds from the corner of a neglected garden. Sun-starved, they grow by the lean light of the moon, a thorny tangle that catches my sleeve. I twist away, eager to be gone from the dark heart of the garden. But the bosky rot releases a perfume. Asafoetida, lurid and luring. I find myself in the garden by choice, to sit amidst the tangle, to feel the scratch of the thorns.
There aren’t many hours of winter left. Nights shorten and shadows recede. I have one last wintry wish: to bring my candle close to the shadow’s book and read what it’s scribbled in the dark. I want to dig beneath the briar and pluck out the stories I’ve buried deepest, to wipe off the chilly soil and arrange them for study, careful and tender as a botanist examining the nightshade’s pale, narcotic roots.
Why? Because I know I’ve reached another impasse. Because I’m tired of scaling false summits and lingering on wind-burned plateaus. Because it’s the next step, as a writer and someone who wishes to live peacefully on her own terms.
Because I’ve been avoiding it.
Because the weight of untold stories can bring you to your knees.
And though I have committed to receiving my stories “by silent ways” I hope that some of the underworld can be brought above ground, that moonlight and briars, narcotic gardens and ferocious gales might one day be mapped in a book.
Have you ever tried shadow work? If you have insights about bringing your dark side to light I’d love to hear them in the comments.
Your writer,
Kate xx
How timely this letter is! I recently had a dream about Juliet from Romeo and Juliet...only she told me quite a different story than the one we already know. Ever since then, I feel like she's been haunting me, begging me to tell it, even if only to myself so that I understand her in a way that no one ever has. It's a special kind of magic, the magic of stories. It's the only way we can come close to living another life. And sometimes it really feels like those other lives just won't leave us alone....
Currently, I'm weighed down by untold stories. The shadow realms grabbed me this winter. I seem to be channeling Persephone. As spring is on the threshold of becoming, so too am I.