Becoming New

I'm a bad-weather writer.
It seems as if words will only spill from my heart when I feel some pain, or sadness, or loneliness. Makes for a depressing read, I know. It's hard to look happy when you're always sad. Something I've learned over my few years is that the more I do for myself the sadder I become, just like the longer I think about the things that I don't have, the more what I do have becomes ugly to my heart. Have you ever thought that, or is it just me?
I'm battling a strange emotion tonight--that of loss and disappointment so deep that I hardly know what to do with myself. I've had this feeling a few times before, but that doesn't make it any easier. There's a reason some of the most beautiful poetry written is about loss and loneliness--it just melds so easily in with the crashing of waves and dark nights, with empty beds and candlelight. Last year this time I was battling with losing my childhood home and the birthplace of everything good in me. Last spring marked a year since my "first love," in reality very foolish, buried a chunk of my heart in the warming earth, and this year, well, that's a story for another time.
I just can't talk about it now.
I go between phases of writing bad poetry that would make a proper English teacher cringe, to vomiting out raw emotions through my fingertips. And through it all I'm not quite sure I really know how to live with myself anymore. I'm not sure I've ever really dealt with any of my pain or my broken dreams... It's more like I've folded them all neatly and tucked them away in a box in the top of my closet, labeled warning: open at your own risk. So they stay there, and I try to forget them, but they never really ever go away. I can't burn them up, I can't send them away, and I can't ever completely forget them. I think the part that bothers me the most is that no one can have me without having all my boxes come along too.
I wish life wasn't this way. But I probably wouldn't be the person I am today without all those boxes hidden away. I wouldn't have the wisdom that comes with making mistakes, and I wouldn't have the marks that set my life apart from yours. Just because my world is different than yours doesn't mean that you are better than me, or I better than you. We were all born for a different purpose, and tonight I'm trying to find comfort in the fact that maybe I couldn't fulfill my purpose without all these scars that shape my heart and mold my path. Maybe, just maybe, it's just simply the process burning away the layers of dross to reveal that beautiful, pure gold that every man wishes he had--becoming something new and utterly precious with every heartache and every pang.