Journal Entry

This life I’ve built for myself, this life I’ve come to adore, this life where I’m somehow finally comfortable in my skin.

It is a false one.

It is a life that, I'm afraid, I have created in my head.

When everything is a figment of my imagination it is hard to say what is true. It is hard to leave stones unturned, motives unexplored, words unanalyzed, it is hard to leave things unknown.

Because the writer must know.

The creator must know.

Coming back home is looking the real story in the eye.

Coming back home is forgoing control of the only thing I have ever controlled.

Facing what was written for me by someone else,

Looking at myself in The Mirror that I once covered, out of fear of realizing the ugly truth.

The Mirror where every flaw on my body is highlighted in bright red lipstick.

Coming home is truly humbling.

No amount of training as a writer will ever change the story of a neglected little girl who was afraid of her own reflection in The Mirror.

No matter how many thoughts, feelings, and characters I manufacture in my head, 

I will always be this:

Red eyes, sad songs, loneliness, and a pen.

This seemingly perfect life where I am happy and “famously lovable” does get hard to believe on the days when my truly fragmented soul surfaces again.

A mass of matte black against the background of my powder pink bedroom, with no one to bear witness but my two tired eyes.

This story has an end. It is a ticking time bomb.

A piece of chocolate in a golden wrapper, with an impending expiration date.

The gold wrapper holds together a melted interior, but it is on its last leg.

There is not much more I can do for the plot and still come out unscathed.

Not many more twists this limited-time series can take before they kill off the main character.

I can’t write my friend’s thoughts and actions into existence, but I also can’t help but assume that the truth I have written for them is in fact the truth. The writer must know, and if she cannot know, she must invent. Invention lies at the limit of a lifetime of necessity. 

Sometimes, what we write converges with what is happening before our eyes, and they meet at a fatal expiration date. In an explosive mutual release of their stored potential energies.

This is where the contents of my rotting insides will finally burst out of my self-manufactured golden bubble.

That is when this story will end,

And a new one will begin. 

I know I will go on, there's always the plot that lives within the four walls of my teenage bedroom. The doom that was written 21 years ago, the mother plot if you will.

I will come up with another frame narrative. Another layer to cover up the gaping holes in my being. Another explanation for why I spend so much time fixing myself like a vintage car that leaks oil onto newly polished driveways.

I will find new people who might willingly accept the theories I impose onto them.

But eventually, I will come back home and look at myself in The Mirror again, at the person I used to be before I called myself a writer.

She will have finally shed her gold exterior and underneath it will be 

the girl I was always meant to be.

Who I spent my entire life running away from, trying not to become.

The person who I’m doomed to be is this:

Red eyes, sad songs, loneliness, and a pen.