I have a bad habit of viewing other people as characters in a story, whether it be a novel or an epic or a tragedy. It continues well into friendship, too, even though I ought to have been disenchanted by then: instead, I'm only met with a fiercer, more developed image, more details and idiosyncracies to work with. But even the most dynamic of literary personas can't rival my friends in terms of personality; so why, why do I constrain them so?

My brain is just, like, totally devoid of thought right now. I've never really had this happen before. I don't know what to do.

Subjects that used to captivate me - an intense gaze, a band of light, incorrigible, angry words - don't anymore. Instead, they just leave a raw burn. A burn that doesn't even sting. Just feels numb.

I know I wasn't always this way. I know I was once a vessel for art, and thought, and food. Food as in the kind that satiates your mind: I so hate how indulgence looks on me. I don't care that it makes me glow more, makes me shine from the inside out.

The problem is with consumption. The problem is that I've consumed too much stuff that's bad for me - reels, videos, ice cream bars, cake - and now, my thoughts reflect the contents of my stomach.

You're a coward. You love writing, but you're too afraid to devote yourself fully to it, so now the craft you have honed has abandoned you. In time you'll convince yourself you never, ever loved writing at all, that you didn't spend your childhood pacing around the room murmering the words to your next story, and if the phonemes didn't come out right - if the "ie" in "Mollie" sounded too much like a "y" - you'd backtrack and start at the beginning of the sentence, and if you got too frustrated, you'd start over altogether.

Don't you love words, no matter their form? Don't you love language, even if it betrays you? Don't you love yourself, enough to choose what you love?

When was the last time you paced a room, vowels and consonants clashing before they could make it out of your mouth? It was three days ago; you were thinking about Felisha. The pure, unconscious way she looked as she told you that she often thought about how people saw her, sitting in the backseat of the car. Did they think she was athletic? Pretty? Smart?

You imagined her round-sharp-oval-square face as she glanced out the car window, simultaneously scared of and wanting to be perceived. You thought about the range of emotions one experiences in adolescence and how people react to being seen. For her, in the instance a stranger notices her and assigns traits to her, she is seen: but what about you?

Writing is an instrument; good writing is a probe. You secretly want all the contents of your soul to be revealed to the world, despite how gut-wrenchingly ugly it might be. There was a time, when you were younger, that you thought the world might fall apart if you scrutinized it enough. Now that you know the fabric of this reality is firm, how will you pierce it? The way a pen punctures a piece of paper, or the way electrons pass closely parallel to a blazed grating, never touching it? Electrons can't puncture, and neither can you. But I think you'll probe, yet.