2014

A relaxing melody resounded in my ears as I stared into an empty white canvas. I had been staring at this page for weeks now, unable to transpose the words and images in my head to the document. I started again: In my dreams, I could sleep. I took a deep breath, and deleted the line. The desert heat was merciless. Delete.

It had been months since I had been able to write anything, the same kinds of thoughts and feelings washing over me every time I tried. "Why are you writing? You're surrounded by friends, go hang out with them!" "It's a Friday night, go be social!" In my thoughts, the stories I wished to write danced and played themselves out like beautiful secret movies only I had access to: the pain the characters went through, their mannerisms, their pure existence stowed away within the recesses of my consciousness.

Yet, every time I tried to write something, it was as if they were denying me access to them. Messages across media platforms would repeat the same thing over and over: "Come hang out with us!" "Why aren't you going out tonight?" "Do you want to come over and play some games?" It seemed as if everything around me would cloud my thoughts.

I tried to think back to the days where I could write: the solitude of it, the isolation I felt, the inner peace. Except, I realized, it wasn't peace. Every instance in which I found myself writing, I was hurt. Brooding, over some new travesty that had happened to me. My entire last year where I did most of my writing was filled with unhappiness, depression, despair, and loneliness. I wrote to escape my own reality, to craft and build one where I would more comfortably and happily reside within it. It was the most curious realization: I couldn't write because I was happy.

There was nothing to escape from now, no pressure from my problems to make me want to withdraw away from them. I took another deep breath, and stared at the page again. I spent my whole entire year using my own sadness as fuel to create. But, that fuel's gone now. A smile appeared on my face.

It isn't that I can only write when I'm sad, but it appears that I hadn't written anything from any feeling outside of it that I forgot what it felt like. It's not to say that I'm not unhappy in my life currently: of course I am. I don't think any of us are ever truly 100% happy with it. But, I could finally look at it from afar and tell myself "Yeah, there are problems, and I'm recovering from an incredibly potent heartbreak, and I even can't really say where I'll end up in a few years time, but...I'm happy with how it's gone so far."

I removed the earphones from my ears, and nodded at my friend sitting near me typing away at a paper he had to write. I just have to figure out how to start writing from a different place in my heart. A...warmer place. I heard the buzz of my phone next to me, and my neighbors asking me to hang out with them for a while. A bigger smile grew on my face. "I guess life's a little too good right now for me to want to spend any of it in another one," I thought to myself. I rose from my chair, closed my laptop, and went on my way to enjoy my night.

"I'll come back to you all eventually," I thought to the figures in my head.