The world is different. Through white lenses, my mind grows calm in the cold. Streets I have walked every day, every life, are somehow fundamentally changed.

A week ago, I asked for help and you replied with a sentence. A sentence that I turned around in my head over and over and over, a sentence insignificant, without any true meaning, but with so much feeling.

The words you use to express yourself shift. You write, you talk, you discuss, you explain: a different tone, different skill, you use for each.

Your words make me feel. Words make me feel. My own words let me stop feeling, but the words of others? Oh, the words of others flip my emotions at the flick of a switch.

To write is to pour out your soul onto a blank canvas. To speak is to divulge your deepest secrets to the air. To experience such a deluge is to have emotion forced into you until it is spilling out, in a smile, in a laugh, in a sob.

So much of life I experience through osmosis, through the experiences of others, through the emotions of others. Words—black ink on a white page—that mean so little to some, so little often to the people that create them, mean so very much to me.

I treasure words. I keep them in a box in my heart—not my brain—to feel them over and over, pounding, my heartbeat echoed in the devastating prose I have tucked away.

How do I feel uniquely, when so many have felt before me and when I have experienced so much feeling that is not my own? How do I learn to live my own life when everything that I do is merely a reflection of the words of others?

Teach me, with your metaphors and your flowers and your innate ability to make me feel with every word you write. Teach me to live.

Oh, how I wish that my words have as much influence on others as theirs do on me. Oh, how I long for the day when someone says to me “how do you do that” incredulously and I just smile. 

I have read words. I have experienced words. I have loved words; I have hated words; I have felt more because of words than nearly anything in life.

My final wish is to create words.

To see every moment as a story to be told and to tell it. To write poetry that makes you cry, to weave a stunning web of lines and curves and blank space that tell my story so perfectly that you can’t help but stop and feel it.

The world is different than it was a week ago. You told me to write about that. To write about the cold that has crept into my veins, the warmth that has crept into my heart, and the thoughts in my weak mind that keep it there.

But instead, I write about your words, all words. My words, but above all, the words of every single person on this earth, the words that make me feel each and every emotion that they—that you—have ever experienced.

But yes, the world is different. And here I am, romanticizing my melancholic solitude.