Rosa Sophia Godshall

Why I Write

After I’m raped at age 15, my therapist wants to know if I do drugs to cope with the trauma. I tell him no and he appears surprised. I come from a dysfunctional home, like most of his clients, but I’ve found a different outlet. “How do you deal with it?” he asks.

“I write,” I tell him.

As I get older, my reason for writing couples itself with my daily meditation practice. I transfer to a private Buddhist high school where students sit every morning in the dojo for meditation and a dharma talk. In between classes, I sit in the hallway and write.

At home, my mother’s boyfriend says, “So, I hear you want to be a writer.”

“I am a writer,” I tell him. “I want to be a published author.” I don’t have any reason other than wanting to try.

He laughs. “You’ve got a big head, don’t you?” I sneer and never speak to him again.

In my early twenties I start working at a library. My fiction’s being published and I’m trying new things, but my reason for writing is shifting. I can’t put my finger on it anymore. I go to college and earn a degree in automotive technology.

My brother is 27 when he kills himself, and then my writing starts going in circles. Three years after my brother’s suicide, after I start pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing, a professor tells me, “We all have obsessions. Write into them. Keep exploring them.”

I’m still meditating every day—twice a day, now—and I’m writing poetry and hybrid forms, blending all the genres together just to see what happens. I can still see myself at the dojo at the Buddhist high school. I can hear the rain on the aluminum roof. The older I get, the more I see that time doesn’t exist. It’s some kind of construct in which we can find ourselves, if we’re lucky. I keep looking.

Throughout my life, I’ve known death many times. I’ve never been afraid of a corpse or afraid of dying, myself. But I am afraid of being empty-handed, of losing sight of the familiar. I spoon-feed a dying friend in Hollywood, Florida. In Palm Bay, I empty my cousin’s pee-bucket (toward the end of his life, he can’t make it to the bathroom). Too many friends from the Buddhist high school have died of overdoses.

In St. Augustine, Florida, I’m writing custom typewriter poems. In a poem, I write:

I write to remember…I am not my body.

I write because I want to be there for you.

I think of my high school therapist. I send him a message on Facebook, saying, “Thank you for everything.”

This is why I write.

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Rosa Sophia Godshall, MFA, (she/her) is the author of Many Miles (Harbor Editions). She was the recipient of the 2023 Christopher F. Kelly Award for Poetry, sponsored by the Academy of American Poets, through Florida International University. She holds a degree in automotive technology and lives in Palm Bay, Florida. Visit Rosa online here.