Writing

I obsess over words. They swirl around my head all day, all the time. Creep in and out of my ears, slip through my hair, crawl down my throat, and rot in my stomach. I think about them always, so much they make me sick.

“I think you could be an editor, a real good one. Do you ever think about working in the publishing industry?” My mother asks me this. The words in my stomach are squishing and churning and maybe I’ll die because I think I am destined for an office job. I hate my friends and my teachers because it seems that everyone is able to take all the words in their head and pull them out smoothly and beautifully and string together sentences that I breathe in and cry out because I love them so much. 

And then I try, and I try again, to weave something so beautiful from my own thoughts but I have to pull them, yank them, tear the thread and rip at the seams to get them out, out, out, and so that all I have wanted is a knotted mess before my eyes. I hate it all, I hate it all, I hate my rotten brain and my lazy tongue and my inability to think about anything but myself. Because maybe if I could just care about the words and the writing and not about how good I am I could be so much better. I could win back what I had lost. I could be a writer.