This Place of Words

I bring my book to her and read aloud. Like Rilke, she tells me not to be afraid to look deeply into everything, not even pain. I can tell her—my friend—that I want to belong, that it hurts to live always on the outside. She tells me there are many ways to belong in this world, and that it is my work to discover where I belong.

At night, when everyone is silent and everything is still, I lie in the darkness of my windowless room, the place where they exile me from the community of their heart, and search the unmoving blackness to see if I can find my way home. I tell myself stories, write poems, record my dreams. In my journal I write: I belong in this place of words. This is my home. This dark, bone-black inner cave where I am making a world for myself.

Author: Renee Newlon

I am a Turkish American writer and photographer. I work in short-form prose, poetic fragments, and photography. I don’t photograph the event; I photograph the moment after the event. A few things that stay with me: Plato’s Cave, Oberg’s Culture Shock, and Beethoven’s Ever thine. Ever mine. Ever ours. My greatest teacher was my college philosophy professor, Sister Jane Sullivan, who taught me how to think and how to see. View all posts by Renee Newlon