Disvocabulary

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, but I've been down for a while.

She then erased it. Too level. Too similar to a diagnosis.

On some mornings, the melancholy reaches the kitchen before me, she wrote.

Better. However, it seemed borrowed, like if she had read a paragraph somewhere and forgotten about it. Because she had spent so much time acquiring language from other people's emotions, the peculiar agony of being a writer trying to articulate herself was that every genuine feeling arrived already dressed in someone else's words. She questioned whether she could feel depressed in a way that wasn't, in some way, a quotation.

A car drove by outside, its headlights gliding across the ceiling and disappearing. As she watched the light move across the room, Mira pondered how odd it was that she could portray grief so vividly when it belonged to a character like Elena, Frank, or Aunt Ruth, and how the moment she used the same tools on herself, the entire system came to a halt, like a key that fit all locks except her own front door.

When people stated that authors were cowards who pretended to be the most courageous people in the room, she wondered if this was what they meant. She could make the reader cry by picturing a house on fire. However, she kept putting out her own little fires before anyone, including herself, could truly see them. These were the commonplace, private, and plot-free ones.

She gave it another go.

Specifically, I don't think I'm depressed. I guess I'm sick of pretending to have emotions I'm not sure I have anymore, and I'm scared to find out if there's nothing or everything below that act.

She went through it twice. It lacked polish. It lacked the cadence she was accustomed to, the small rises and falls she had honed over ten drafts. Like someone who had chosen to stay at a party despite showing up in the wrong clothing, it just sat there on the screen, plain and a little ashamed of itself.

Strangely, something in her chest relaxed at that precise moment. She was still exhausted and unclear if the pain beneath her ribs was caused by grief or just the weight of a life that had been scrutinized too carefully, but it was loosened in the same way that a knot gives half an inch before giving the rest.

As she typed in the dark, she realized that writing about her emotions was not the same as composing a narrative. A tale begged to be molded, sculpted, and become unavoidable. A sensation that simply wanted to be seen. She didn't require a happy conclusion. The sentence was not necessary for her to justify its position within a more comprehensive framework. It might just exist, incomplete and a little awkward, just like she did at eleven o'clock at nite when everyone else in the house was asleep.

She didn't change the paragraph. No changes. No need to look for a better verb. For the first time in weeks, she didn't feel the need to fill the silence in the house after shutting the laptop.

Since she only trusted that wording, she would refer to it as an early draft tomorrow. She allowed it to be real tonight.