During Sirens, we invited all attendees to write: a testimonial, a love letter, a tale inspired by Sirens. As we work on our new website, arriving November 1, 2015, we will feature the stories shared by the Sirens community.

 
Artemis Grey (@greyartemis)
She was going to fail. That wasn’t in question. Her mother knew it, and her father, too. They had told her as much. Even her grandmother, wild in her youth, agreed with the others. They warned her away with the kindest intentions, speaking with love and protective ministrations. Writing is something almost no one succeeds in. You don’t want to waste yourself. Think of the heartache.

They were right, she knew.

For a while, she resisted. But the song of lost words, of tales long untold, began to writhe and roil beneath her skin, crawling along muscle and nesting against bone. To ignore them brought only more discomfort, an artificial tumor that she could excise if only she lanced the growth with a pen and allowed it to bleed out onto paper.

In the daylight, it was easier, amid the raucous churning of others’ lives, oblivious to the worlds rising and crumbling inside her soul. But the dark hours were long, filled with the whispers of unheard voices and the leftover pieces of unlived lives. And the twilight of dawn was the hardest of all, when she had to turn and face the rising of the sun, and put her back to all that she loved. It was the sickle moon that finally broke her chains, lancing loops of shackle with horns upturned, piercing tips all jagged truth.

And in the smallest hours of deepest night, she drew her pen, and chose to write.