I stand in the garden at night, taste the freshness of the air, look up into the darkness. My husband tells me there are stars spread across the endless Irish sky, untainted by the violence of city pollution, but I don’t see them. I peer with purpose, with the need for proof that we have left the pain behind, but still I see nothing. Eyes blank. Imagination blank. Heart broken.

When we were moving to Ireland, I wanted so much to see the stars, to be bathed in the light of them, to taste the clean glow of a sky that doesn’t carry scars. But, I forgot about my blindness, about my core of darkness and my chains. I think this is why I can’t write, why I have long ceased to feel like a writer. Stars don’t settle on the lashes of the blind and creativity cannot be unleashed from constraint. I write with stifling self doubt, every word labeled as not good enough, each sentence a stain on the screen. My words never seem to make it out of the shallow end; perhaps because I am afraid of the deep, terrified of drowning.

I have been told it is best for a writer to move away from the juvenile space of self, to learn to write about what lives beyond the stretch of fingertips. I don’t even see the tips of my fingers, and have long since lost the ability to imagine what might exist beyond them. I am tangled and still searching for the thread that, when pulled, will help me unravel. I imagine I won’t like the unfurled fist of myself any more than I like this maze of knots and bruises. And, what does any of it matter anyway? It is not pain or even language that makes a writer, but imagination and vision and passion; things I don’t have. I am not seeking reassurance. I know what I do not possess. I write with fear, and as long as this is the truth, I will remain in shallow waters.