Write Like I Know What Happens Next

Sometimes, you are going to be 27, and you feel like you have to relearn everything. Today, I am learning how to write like I know what happens next. But first, I must master putting pen to page like a lover caresses your hair, or at least how we always want them to. I cannot fear failure because in the chase for perfection, I lose sight of importance and care.

Sometimes, I’m 26 and terrified of what comes next. When the lights are dim and the night is quiet, I find that dread waits there, always. It falls like a heavy curtain stopping the show before the finale. When I remember there is an end, everything before feels worthless. Some dreams bring me to a flash of peace that begs to hold place in my life. But I can never find it when I wake. It was just a dream. Just a dream. One day, maybe.

Sometimes, you’re almost 27. Everything feels scary, and you’re not sure if that’s normal, so you write about it. The same stories as when you are 15 play through your thoughts like an endless b-reel. “Write me. Write me,” they beg. And like most things you want to do but haven’t, you don’t have a good excuse other than, “I’m tired.” You are so drowsy that you believe the stories are real. You can’t write them because the illusion that you escaped fiction and have a much more boring, mundane existence will shatter. You forget your own story.

Sometimes, I’m 26, and it is scary because I don’t know how to age without fear. And I’m exhausted because the world is loud and so is my brain. Somedays, all I can think about is finding the silence, the stillness in life like spaces between words … worlds. So often, movement seems careless and simply disturbing.

When you’re almost 27, every moment spent in chaos feels like disaster because time always moves faster than you want. Your whole life is remembered in a blink that wasn’t meant for anything, and then you don’t look back. You just move forward because forward is the only way to go.