Your fingers sometimes shake on the keyboard. Your eyes sometimes burn with the lights of the screens you’re addicted to, tapping out words and exclamation points! and enthusiasm. You are the sun. You are a writer. But, like the twenty Google docs that scream UNFINISHED at you every time you look at them, you are a work in progress. You improve, trying to channel an inner drive that sings words into something better than what they should be. Your eyes become scalpels, precise instruments of death to unnecessary words. You shape yourself like a master carver, shape your words like an artist. Sometimes, though, you get scared to log into email, to one of the four writing websites you’re committed to, to Tumblr. You know what’s waiting for you, and it always turns your mouth dry when you see it. Another rejection. Literary, network, a critique that borders a bit too rude–what does it matter? Don’t they know that you are trying? That you can’t breathe without people and stories and that sometimes you mask your disappointment in feigned ignorance and laughter? Don’t they know what it feels like to be unwanted? You don’t know what you did wrong. You don’t know what you did wrong. Yes, there is a run-on sentence here. A colon that came out as a semicolon. You can understand most things, the way your plot is like a twisted tree branch and has rough spots like bark. But when it comes to conveying more than people on a page who are sometimes you and sometimes not, sometimes you lose the right words and are left people-less in the dark, alone. And you don’t understand why you’re not tall enough to turn on the light yourself. You are the rejected. You are the unwanted. And you better get better or get gone, gone, gone.
I am the unwanted II via @bookwrms
