I really, truly, do not know how to write anymore.

Beautiful words escape me. Everything sounds too forced. I’m sure I’ve written that sentence before. 

I read poem after poem, and I cry. 

I cry because I do not understand what gift those poets were granted that I do not have. 

I do not understand how I was born, allowed to hold this vast love of words, and yet not know how to properly write them.

I want to write metaphors. I want to write similes. I want the sentences to bubble up in my mind, frothing over into my fingertips like a stream flows into a river. 

I want to know if I should write this column artistically or simply. I want to know if I should look up a synonym for every adjective and verb or if I should prove a point by using the word ‘good’ too many times. 

Every letter I type is like a stab wound to the innermost depths of me. I know this could be better, I know this could be better, why won’t this just be better, I don’t know how to write anymore.

It’s too late at night to be writing a column.

This will inevitably turn out too emotional, and even if I do end up publishing it, it will be with a note of embarrassment buried somewhere in my chest.

I can’t let people see the way my words terrify me without them being perfect. 

I am writing too much in too short a time and I know that will mean that it makes too much sense to me and no one else. It will be too focused on one topic that I cannot share in any way other than when I’m typing it into my notes app at 2:23 a.m. because that’s when I can forget that other people will read this in the morning.

I’m sure I’ve written this same thing before. 

I don’t know what to write. I want to write about how overwhelmed I am right now. I want to write about… I swear I just had at least three ideas for how to finish this paragraph, but I can’t remember any of them now.

I am torn between topics until I finally have to choose and then there are no subjects left for me. 

I read word after word that belongs to other people until I sob.

I do not understand why I was cursed this way.

There must be some tragically beautiful way to explain it but I’ve never been good at finding the right beautiful words and it’s too late in the night for tragedy. 

The tears on my cheeks are salty and so was the blood on my lip when I bit through it this morning.

But everyone knows that. Tears have tasted like salt since the first famous poets wrote it down a millennia ago.  

Nothing I have ever written is profound. Nothing I have ever written will make anyone’s soul ache for more to be said. I always say too much anyway.

I am either too cliché or too boring. 

I am trying to write this eloquently. I am trying to sift through threads of the thoughts I bury in my mind. I am trying to pull something out that will make you stare at your computer screen with your heartbeat drowning out all noise. 

But I will never write something like that, and to me, that’s about as heartbreaking as it can get. 

I will forever be cursed to sit and read poetry too late at night. I will forever be mourning the loss of myself that comes with every new word that I type. 

I will forever be frustrated. I will forever be alone with my thoughts because I will never have the ability to share what I truly want to say.

My words are stuck behind a metal net and I am sobbing. My fingers are aching and bleeding from trying too hard to force them from their cage. 

Will someone please just open it for me?

I don’t know how to do it myself. I don’t know how long I can keep trying until my hands give out and my fingers break. 

My words will never affect anyone as strongly as others have affected me. I do not know how to write this. I am not expressing myself the way I want to be. 

Please, someone just tell me what to do. 

There are so many things that I want to write about. I can feel them piling up between my shoulder blades. Suffocating me. They flood into my throat and spill out of me, carried on salt particles from my tears.

And then they are lost forever.

I will never find those thoughts again. Even as I am writing this I can feel the sentences slipping away from me. I swear there was something else I had to say. 

I’m mourning the loss of everything that will never be written. Genius ideas will never be thought of again because my brain is too polluted by finals, homework, and schedules to remember to hold onto my overly-exhausted poetic snippets.  

I want to write about beautiful things. I want to write about tragic, wonderful, heart-wrenchingly painful things. I want to find a synonym for “things.”

God, that ending really should have been better. 

No, I can’t end it like that either, that’s too cliché. But so is this. And this. And this. 

Please, someone just cry over my writing someday so that I might just keep a few words to myself.