If love is the light that dissolves all the walls, why did it make these ones thicker? What you did was ultimately love, I know. Well, mixed with the quiet desperation of never making it outside the realms of Almost There. You wanted out so badly that you made love up. Love was going to work for you so well. You told me that so many times. But it’s made me love you so much less as I witnessed it all. I can’t help it. I feel bitter, resentful, and downright upset, even though I know the truth – that this love isn’t real. 

There is nothing to be jealous of. This is all make-believe, I know. And yet here I am, standing still at the door of your made-up world, gathering my strength to knock, be let in, and not let it show; how jealous I am. How mad I am. How unforgiving I find it all, and how beautiful I find it all, and how unbelievable I find it that you went through with it all. I’m standing in front of it, trying to get myself to believe in the lie you turned into truth in front of our eyes. I just can’t get over you making the ugly this beautiful.

Picture this: there is an empty space next to you at the table. You make it the shape of everything you need. Now you say hello. This is you at your best, also known as Your Strength, but you haven’t been properly introduced yet. You don’t know what it is, and you don’t know it’s yours. You just know that you like its presence. You let it vanish as you keep doubting your power.

Or you walk to work, heels echoing on the pavement, still a bit of warmth from the bed clinging to you. You take a seat on the bus and fall asleep to the sound of traffic. The night before you were at your desk, hoping it would knock at your door, take off its wet clothes, and sit with you by the fire. Add a glass or two of red wine to the picture.

I curl up in the empty bed. I can’t get warm. When I don’t write, the warmth trickles out little by little. My body keeps the score. ‘Have you expressed yourself lately?’ it asks. I sigh. I can’t write when I can’t feel. What am I supposed to do? My heart is elsewhere, and I don’t always know how to bring it back home.

I was told there is a hardness to my eyes where there once used to be light. I curl into my shell like a snail. The words hurt then, and hurt now. I remember the way I felt those days – desperate not to be the girl with the soft eyes and the even softer heart, ashamed that I was – and I just want to melt back into them. But the trouble now is that I can’t. One summer there was no girl left in me. Whatever has grown back since simply doesn’t feel the same.

Sure I’m mad – but behind the anger, beyond the frustration, underneath the hate, there’s only sadness. The other layers aren’t even real. I made them up to cover it up. Boredom is rage spread thin, and sadness is grief the same way. There’s just so much love inside me, and it’s got nowhere to go from here. I’ve got nothing to do with it. I spend my days watching it die.

I press Replay like a maniac. It tricks my brains into thinking we’re working on it. In the background there’s always me screaming ‘can you still love me, despite of this’ where this is me, followed by a pause. I wait to hear yes like a blessing, like permission to rest, like forgiveness for being the way I am. But the answer remains radio silence. It sounds like no even when it doesn’t sound like anything at all, and it’s making me bitter and mean and impatient.

It’s been another year. Let me pull you gently now and take one good look. You are vibrant and gorgeous, and your mind is insanely cool. But you say, ‘I am trying to be you, but I am not you,’ and your hands are cold and don’t remember how to rub together, and your legs are restless and follow imaginary circles on the kitchen floor. I swear I don’t know what to say.

The right thing would be, ‘But you are me,’ but I know that you wouldn’t believe it. Not now, after the year you’ve had. You think you’re light years away from what you’ve dreamed of becoming by now. I get it. You need more time to come back to yourself. You need more time to come back to me.

I write fiction because it feels less intrusive. We invent the worlds we need to make sense of reality. It’s a safe space to taste the juicy goodness of the present moment, or stretch your heart open to let the vague foggy sadness out. No one has a clue what you’re doing, and it looks interesting and fun to watch. But writing is always confessional. The need to hide always gets crushed by the weight and weirdness of the need to confess. And suddenly, your characters start talking to themselves, or to each other; and there lies everything you want to say.

I want to believe in God, but I doubt that He’d believe in me if I were to make Him up again. I’ve been staring into space for so long now and not once have I had the feeling that we may get on good terms, even if I let Him exist again out of sheer desperation. It wouldn’t be like when I was little and He was bigger than the world, which, even for an imaginative child, was hard to picture. Hell no. It’d probably be more like, ‘Ok, you can come out of the bottle now, I’ve got my three wishes, you ready?’ I shake my head – in disbelief, may I add – and laugh to myself, and it rattles something awake inside me. It’s bittersweet to let myself feel something, no matter how small. I remain loyal to my tendency to shut down in moments of crisis. It’s just that I’m not sure this, too, shall pass.

from a work in progress

Towns at rest, people going home, intermittent patches of glitter and dark everywhere, all the little things that make life up were dancing restlessly through her lashes. Head leaning against the car window, Kara felt wide awake with fear and curiosity. Houses rolled past her like a tracking shot in a film, blurring and disappearing from view the very next moment. But they didn’t hold her interest for long. The passenger seat (the safe haven) and speed (a delicious break from the reality of the moment) were half-assing their jobs too. On the other side of the car, Tomás kept giving sighs of helpless irritation, distracting her from her attempt to stay distracted.

‘Damn you,’ she mouthed silently to herself, and buried her face in her coat.

When you fictionalise your life you have to make up some of the words yourself – the way they taste, the way they sound in the air – and twist them until no one can tell what hell you dragged them out of. When they ask, you tell them you read a lot as a kid, then you let them poke at your surface to give them some kind of clarity. They don’t need to know how you encouraged yourself to leave the mind and step onto paper, with all your words held tightly in your arms. How you were careful not to drop them and break the memories you got them from. How long you spent reorganising them until they looked nothing like the story underneath the story. No. They don’t need to know the words are you. You must tell them that you were inspired by books and films and general knowledge, and carry on with your life as if art was merely an insignificant slice of it, and the first time you tried it you inexplicably ate it whole. No big deal.