I need to write a story. I need to write a story where the characters don’t die, or wind up ground on the pavement in a bloody mass – literally or figuratively. I need to write a story where everything works out.
But I need to write a story that’s real.
I don’t know how to fit those last two sentences together.
My story has already seen its characters die, so many now that I’ve stopped ticking off the number of funerals I’ve attended and let the number stretch vaguely into oblivion. My story has characters ground up meatily on the pavement – though mostly figuratively, on that point.
I think I’m one of those characters.
Life is confusing to me. It’s perhaps why I’ve been having such a hard time writing stories, lately. Everything’s on hard mode, and I don’t understand why. I have tried. I have stayed. I have fought. I have pushed. I have kept going.
Why hasn’t it gotten any easier yet?
I see people – former classmates, neighbors, random interviewees on the news – who seem to have gotten the soft route. Yeah, everybody’s got shit to deal with. But these people, they seem to have gotten the milder, nicer-smelling brand of shit. They prance around in their pastel-colored world with high-end fabrics and bleached hair and sunglasses the size of mating saucers on their face, and… it’s not that I want their lives. I don’t. At all. But… they seem happy.
They have their success, their fame, their goddamn fucking fortune – and they are satisfied.
I want to be satisfied.
I have all this hard work, all this trying, all this hoping and hurting and hacking away at all the obstacles life’s chucked at my nose, and for it all, I have only…
loss.
The little bits of satisfaction I find slip away, taint with time or fade so that the blaring wrongness of this story is what comes out stronger than the former salve of the moment’s calm.
I don’t like this story anymore.
I’ve been trying to write a different one for such a long time.
I worry there isn’t any different story to write anymore.
Quill Aquiver 
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