I wrote this for a Pitchapalooza virtual event recently. I wasn’t chosen at random, but I figure I can still put it out there.

A crabby hermit clambering through different shells.

Pretty shells, gritty shells, broken shells, stubborn shells; a continuous struggle against the shells that hold us and the shells that expose us.

Shells echo sound, often the crashing waves of the ocean…though now, the crashing waves of my life.

But what if the sound echoed from my heart? Not a beating heart, but a ticking one. Ticking soft, ticking loud.

Every tick of time marks a moment in the stories of my life.

Some shells may tick louder than others – Every tick is solid in its impact, reverberating though time, like a note plucked on a guitar string.

My heart’s strings, sounding out the stories of a lonely child, multiple relocations, a new country, the cruelty of peers – both in youth and adulthood, the chronic pain of a new normal, the nevermore of what you expected to always be, how passion lies and heartbreak subsides, the feeling of Death as It claws near but releases you to start anew, how it is to be a woman but not a mother, a woman but not a housewife, and a woman with little care for tact yet a heart full of empathy for what truly matters.

Because she knows how every shell has its own echo; every form that holds each story was designed to fit differently and reveal its truth brilliantly.

Pick up and hold these shells as you would a book laid open in your hands.

Do you feel the echoes as the moments of my life tick loud?

Soak up the cacophony of ticking memories.

It’s only my story plucking at your heart strings.