There are moments when the pen doesn't glide. It shakes. It hesitates just before touching the page, as if it's afraid of what might spill out. Afraid that the ink will betray the silence I've carefully curated.
This chapter isn't about writing. Not really. It's about the space before writing—the fear-laced breath, the battle in the wrist, the fragile flicker of truth begging to break free.
It happened one winter morning. Cold enough for the windows to sweat, quiet enough for me to hear the ticking of the old clock that lived above my desk. I had the day to myself, a warm cup of coffee, a blank notebook, and a head full of everything I never said out loud.
The perfect setup.
And yet, I sat there for hours.
Pen in hand.
Page untouched.
Thoughts loud.
Fingers still.
It wasn't writer's block. It was something more personal than that. It was soul-stammering. Heart-paralysis. A trembling not of the hand, but of the memory it held.
I wanted to write about my mother.
But I was afraid I'd get it wrong.
Or worse—I'd get it right, and the truth would be too much to carry.
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My mother was soft-spoken and steel-spined. A woman who never raised her voice, but could silence a room with one glance. She never wrote her feelings down. She didn't believe in journaling. She believed in getting on with things. But I always suspected she had stories—wounds—stored behind the quiet.
She died without ever telling them.
And here I was, two years later, pen trembling over a blank page, afraid to resurrect her in my own words.
What if I made her too soft?
What if I made her too hard?
What if I wrote her honestly, and someone who loved her read it and didn't recognize her?
What if I wrote her, and I didn't recognize her?
I set the pen down.
Walked away.
Came back.
Tried again.
Still, nothing.
And then I remembered something she once said to me—not in a moment of wisdom, but during one of those casual conversations that lives in the walls of your memory forever.
"You don't have to write the whole truth all at once," she said. "Start with what you remember feeling."
So I wrote one line:
> I remember the way her hands smelled like lemon soap when she touched my face.
It was small. Almost too gentle. But it was real.
And it opened the door.
---
The pen trembled, but it moved.
I wrote how she always stood in the kitchen with one sock on, forgetting the other. How she hummed under her breath while folding clothes, but never sang. How she kept birthday cards from people she never spoke to anymore. How she had a favorite mug she never drank from.
I wrote how her silence shaped me more than her advice.
And then I wrote the hard things. The moments I wasn't supposed to remember. The night I heard her crying through the thin bathroom walls. The way she flinched when someone said, "You should have done more." The way she never let herself rest.
I wrote until my hand cramped and the page blurred from tears I didn't know I was still holding.
The pen trembled, but it didn't stop.
---
I thought writing about her would feel like betrayal. But it felt like resurrection. I wasn't stealing her story—I was meeting her again, this time with a pen instead of expectation.
And somewhere in that trembling, I found pieces of myself, too.
Because writing about her meant writing about where I came from.
What I inherited.
What I feared becoming.
What I desperately hoped to keep.
I realized that the pen doesn't tremble out of weakness. It trembles out of reverence. Out of truth. Out of knowing that once a word is written, it cannot be undone.
And maybe that's the point.
---
Since that day, I've started to honor the tremble.
I no longer see it as resistance. I see it as a sign I'm touching something sacred.
Some people write with confidence. Some write with fire.
But I write with trembling hands, and that's okay.
Because the tremble means I'm telling the truth.
And the truth is always a little shaky at first.