What if I quit writing? If the only writing I did from now on was a text or email and I no longer felt the need, the pressure to place complex human emotion on the page. The words used to flow so easily from my head; so many ideas and thoughts. I don’t have anything to say anymore. I look at my arsenal; car accidents, pain, lots of blood that is now dried, brown and flakes away. These things are in the past. These things are my story. No one cares about my story; perhaps not even I do, now.

It’s as if nothing new has happened in the past five years.  Nothing terribly sad anyway. I can’t write about a good ending, there is no fire there. If I were a neurologist I couldn’t perform heart surgery. All doctors are not the same; no writer is ever the same as another. I cannot write what I don’t know, and everything that I do write seems to echo a piece already done. Same topic, same conclusion, same theme: Dwelling.

I look for new material in the past, digging further into topics that are derelict and decayed. I rummage through the filth and grasp at the straws buried there. Things, no matter how terrible, that I do not carry an opinion on anymore. I see nothing in the future that I could dream up that wouldn’t be a sad missing puzzle piece that I’m looking and asking for disguised in a story.

I sit at home in my bathrobe, staring at the blank computer screen and feel a burn that is not desire, its pressure. What if I quit and allowed myself to fade into a twenty-something who doesn’t have a dream? Would the published book that now hangs over my head like a sword disappear? Or worse, melt down next to the ghosts that I reach for in the past that I will never touch again?

Luciana, 26