NOT A Chapter.

I don't know what this is. An essay. There.

What good are your thoughts up here, locked away in this prison of a brain?

Banging against the walls like birds in a locked room. If one escapes it’s by crashing through a window. Bloody and injured, it falls onto a page, its captor watching unapologetically as the dying creature pulls its broken form across the blankness, leaving a trail of feathers and smears of blood. With a final sigh, it pops into thin air, and all that is left of a potential thought is a messy catastrophe of something beautiful before it was foolishly put into words.

Nothing is the same outside of the safety of your mind. Everything becomes tarnished, contaminated by the atmosphere of reality, because nothing sounds like something new, nothing sounds like anything that mightn’t have been written by someone else already. And what’s the point if you can’t say anything the way you like, the way everyone can understand exactly what you mean? So you continue to scratch the gluttonous impulses like an animal, or a machine, getting through the days simply by filling the void. Everything becomes a guilty pleasure until you find yourself sitting atop a mountain of candy wrappers and toys and trinkets, a King Slug oozing self gratification.

If I were a painter, I’d paint; and if I were a singer I’d sing, but I’m a writer, and all I can do is try to make the words of one measly language match the mess in my head. And, in my wildest dream, they’d both be beautiful and true.

There are writers that throw you into a world with no guidance but your own intellect, there are those that hold your hand because they know that real life is hard enough to navigate, and why not help you along in theirs, and there are those that abashedly tell their story, giving it an honest effort to make sure you get it, but making no apologies if you just won’t. And then there’s me- who can’t make anything last more than a paragraph, and certainly not connect one paragraph to the other. How do the others do it? How do they sit and write sentence after proposition after question after statement about the same thing? HOW COULD YOU POSSIBLY HAVE A THESIS? Perhaps I just found mine. For this particular little nonentity of an article, at least.  

The point, I suppose, is that writing essays SUCKS. Mostly because I know I can’t ramble on and write down the dozens of ideas I have on the subject because at most I’m only supposed to have a handful and one of them better be the entire focus of my essay. Is one of my ideas really supposed to be that good that I can sit and chew on it for five to six pages? Why is it bad to have a new thesis every few sentences? If that’s the way I think things through then why should I pretend not to write that way? Someone’s going to have to sit and read a boring, unnatural essay that sounds like it was written by someone on tranquilizers and then translated by four different people who speak different dialects. School ruins everything. Everything ruins everything.