The Ink's Weight
At eleven o'clock at night, Mira sat at her desk as she always did when the house was finally quiet enough for her to hear her own thoughts. Like a little, patient heartbeat, the cursor blinked at her. She had made a self-promise to write something real tonight, not a fictionalized account of someone else's sorrow or a character that wept so she wouldn't have to. Something real. Something she owns.
It was supposed to be simple. She had spent fifteen years crafting phrases from the imagined grief of others. She was an expert at creating pain on paper, and she knew exactly where to put a comma to make it stick in the reader's throat. Her own emotions, however, would not cooperate. They weren't organized into paragraphs. They sat inside her, unshaped and unyielding, like water that had yet to choose a container.
She typed: I don't know why,…
