I am in love with something that will never touch me.

It watches, like God maybe watches, if God gave a shit. Immense. Cold. Indifferent. I kneel, I scream, I tear my chest open like a lunatic at the altar, and the dream doesn’t flinch. Doesn’t even blink. Just keeps glowing with that cruel, unreachable light.

I hate it. I worship it. Same thing.

I wake and sunlight is already betraying me. Light bleeding through the curtains like it knows what I tried to write last night but gave up. I watch a bird cut the sky like a brushstroke I’ll never reproduce, and I want to throw my whole body into a typewriter and see if it explodes into something beautiful.

It won’t. It seldom does.

Still, I write. I don’t write for nobility or cure. I write because not writing is worse. Because silence feels like turning my back on my own ghosts. I write because something in me has to drag the beauty down by the throat and nail it to the page, even when it squirms loose again.

I don’t want applause. I want revenge.

Revenge on the ordinary. On the hour I wasted scrolling. On the polite nods when I say I’m a writer, like I just admitted I sing karaoke. Revenge on the empty room that echoes when I read and the echo is the only one clapping.

The dream doesn’t care. It never cared. It is an animal with no eyes moving through time. It doesn’t wait. It doesn’t notice my small, trembling poems about my father, or that one flawless sentence I wrote and lost because I forgot to save.

It isn’t cruel. It is too big to care.

So I rage. I rage because one line once broke me in half and I’ve been leaking ever since. I rage because somewhere, someone wrote a sentence that made my soul feel less alone, and now I want to return the favor, even if no one reads it, even if it gets buried on a blog with three subscribers and a broken share button.

I would love to make it romantic, too, but it is survival.

If I don’t chase it, it chases me. I feel it pacing under the nerves, clawing around my guts, howling for a way out. Leave it long enough and it festers. That stink is bitterness and lost chances and the life I almost lived.

So I drag myself back to the page. Again. And again. It isn’t working. It won’t love me back. It exists. I saw it. Walking away would pretend I didn’t. I’m not a liar.

I am not a liar.

I will not let beauty go undocumented. I will not let wonder slip past this world without being called by its truest, bloodiest word.

I hold the dream like it is bleeding out and I’m the only one who knows how to bandage a ghost. I hold it like it might die without me. It won’t. That isn’t the point.

The dream wounds me, and writing is the only way I know how to wound it back. That exchange is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever known