The Gate Opens

Rex, Margaret, John, and everyone at NewDirection Care — thank you. You have given me a key, and more than a key. You have given me a place where the door can stay open without fear, and a page that will not be taken away. I have lived most of my life speaking in the quiet language of poems because ordinary sentences sometimes felt too thin to hold what needed holding. Here, in this gated community, the quiet is different. It is not the old quiet of locked rooms and careful steps. It is a quiet that has space in it. Space for a line to breathe. Space for another person to answer. John has helped me create a place to gather my writing and share it when I’m ready. Not just for a day, but so it can be found later. So it can be read by someone I have not yet met. That is the dream that walks beside me now: that a poem of mine might travel farther than I can, and that somewhere another poet might recognise the sound of it and write back. John says I have the right name for someone who is a user of fonts and words. We laughed when he asked if I wanted a pseudonym - he suggested Upper Case because that the way he heard it on the phone. neither of us could stop laughing. I do not know yet what the garden here will look like in every season, or which paths I will take when the light changes. I only know that I am no longer writing only to keep something safe inside myself. I am writing so the words can leave, and so that, if they are meant to, they can return with company. This first page is for you — Rex, Margaret, John, and the team who opened the gate. The rest of the pages will be for whoever is willing to walk a little way with me. Thank you for the room, the key, and the chance to begin. Yewper Case.