Young Writers Society

I needed to write something. My fingers, with their chipped off nailpolish and their edges all wrinkled from being bit, twitched against the keyboard as I searched for the words to write. A thousand scraggly letters all dipped and dove through the maze of my mind, all of them shouting or whispering or simply calling to me in a low, beckoning voice as I attempted once more to sort through them.

It felt as though the words had always been there, swimming around in my head with that confusion jumble of noise always begging to get out. Yet sometimes, like now, they pressed especially hard and murmured with much more persuasiveness than usual. I wanted to cave in and allow them to have their fun and tell their tales, but the faster I typed the more confused I felt. There had been a time when words used to sooth me and comfort me. Now they taunted me, and as I set them free they grew wilder and louder with their chorus of threatening voices.

I wanted to feel happy. I wanted that strange calmness that seems to make its home in the hearts of some people. I wanted my breath to fall evenly, without the catch that interrupted it as I tried to unclench my muscles and release the tension I felt. Why was it that other people were allowed to feel joy? To feel peace? Why not me?

Me, the silly girl who sat wearing too short shorts and a hand-me-down tanktop, melting in the stuffy air of Oaxaca in March. I was the girl who wrote novels for fun, and always had a few poems tucked into my school notebooks. I was the girl who wrote letters to characters I'd invented and whispered stories to myself at night. I was the girl who had just finished the sixth Harry Potter movie and was wondering what it was that may have stopped my Hogwarts owl from arriving seven years ago. I kept trying to convince myself that Hogwarts had become a college instead of a highschool, and they were just waiting until my eighteenth birthday to send out the familiar white envelope with green letters on the front. Soon enough the old owl would rap his beak against my window, maybe with a few feathers missing due to some strange bread of Mexican Giant unknown to wizards in Harry Potter's day.

Then again, maybe Hogwarts never existed and Harry Potter was just a few words strecthed out between seven large volumes. Maybe his creator once sat in front of a blank screen with a million words screaming into her head to be let out. With her heart pounding with emotion that she couldn't explain, that Ron could never understand, that growled and fought to be let out with the same ferocity of a dementor or a trapped professor.

Or maybe not. Maybe, I was the only girl who could fit so many feelings into one second. Maybe no one else spend so much time absorbed in empty thoughts and mindless conversation with the surrounding air. Maybe sadness and horror were not a normal part of a normal person's day. Maybe depression was tobe the adventure I'd longed for for so long. Just as I used to take migraines and pretend that some evil villain had poisoned me or tortured me to reveal some long lost secret, so I would find a way to turn the pain into a story. After all, words on a page are far less terrifying than real pain. Yet still, the words did not provide the comfort they once had.

I sat, and my head flooded with ideas and pictures. Nothing meaningful, though, nothing important. Empty words, just like my heart. Empty. A balloon that had been filled with too much air and then left to fly about the air in a frantic, confused dance until only a stretched out piece of plastic remained. Now even the plastic of my heart was beginning to tear, and as I sat before all the words I spilled out onto the page, I began to wonder if I'd ever make it.

A motorcycle drove past on the highway, and the neighbor's car engine flared to life. Downstairs, I could hear my younger brother speaking to my parents, and the distant sounds of my mom making dinner. A dog barked somewhere in the neighborhood, and the peacock across the bridge gave off a desperate cry. The light in my room flickered, foreshadowing, perhaps? Once more the light flickered, and then faded completely, just as the plain wooden door slammed shut and a small peck sounded against the glass of my window...