I tried to write a song.

A melancholy song, full of days of numbness like codeine, depriving me of all sensation, and nights spent staring at the wall because no matter how I tossed and turned or kicked, sleep wouldn’t bring its comatose embrace.

A simple song, a D-minor, maybe an E-major, an A chord, a D7. An A-minor like the frustration like steam boiling up and rattling my brain over simple things. A B-major for those moments laying still on a mound of blankets while all the poems and stories I couldn’t bring myself to finish leaked through the seams of the locked box in my chest. A chord progression so heartbreaking, it wouldn’t even require words to convey the emotion.

But the lyrics.

Oh, the lyrics.

The lyrics were the best of all.

Some subtlety towards the beginning, but immediately blunt when the climax hit, it would have explained everything, everything I was so afraid to share in fear it would be a double-edged sword to be used against me and laughed at in the present or future, everything that people would deny, patting my head with a condescending smile and insults dressed as reassurances.

I tried to write a song.

But I forgot a pen and paper

So the words fell off my tongue

Into an abyssal well of memory

And as much as I try to catch

And seek and look for and find

The words once as familiar as a heartbeat

They remain stuck in the dark, just out of mind.

Bio: Ever since I can remember, I’ve been driven to create, whether it be art, poems, or stories. To me, creating something is a way to get people to think about the world differently, whether it be through a particularly good painting or a thought-provoking novel. It lets us put the stories and images we all carry inside our heads down on paper where everyone can see. A few artists that have helped inspire my work with their own stories and images are Neil Gaiman, Maggie Stiefvater, and Jonathan Sims.