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I stay up late and watch movies, just to feel something. My guilty pleasures are broken characters, lost loves, and small hopes, rolled into an hour and a half of an emotional roller coaster. My eyes ache for a moment when someone dies, someone gets left behind, someone learns that they just aren’t good enough. My fingers always find the keys afterwards, my brain finds its spark.

Watching other people’s lives through a movie screen reminds me that life is out there, that with each beat of my heart there is still hope. I don’t feel it right now, thinking about it hurts, but I know that it’s out there. To be truly alive is a wonderful and terrible thing. It hurts so badly, but a few years from now you look back and remember how many memories you’ve created. I always escape the hurt in the moment, and looking back is like peering through a foggy window.

I sketch a smiley face with my finger and move on. A liquid bead of condensation traces a tear down its cheek, but I’m long gone.

I sit in the dark and write out my thoughts. That’s all we are. That’s all our emotions are.

We all crave to be so truly alive but we are so afraid of living. That pain is part of it, and yet we all run from it, escape into our phones and planned moments on social media.

Sometimes I feel like writing is a lot like living, until I realize that it is not. I craft these characters out of keystrokes and ink splattered fingertips. I play god with their lives, pouring my thoughts and fears into them, filling their souls until ink leaks like blood from their pages.

I realize they aren’t living, that the story is going on outside of my room, that recently the only story I’ve been etching into being has been trapped inside of my head. My fingers falter on the keys. They’ve been faltering all along. Since that last heartbreak, that last roller coaster moment after stepping off that plane, that last pull of drink, I’ve been floundering.

Living is a lot like writing. You just close your eyes and feel the heartbeats of everyone in the room, feel the words bursting inside of them, waiting to be spilled out from liquor stained lips. Each time their heart beats, a little more of their story leaks out, a little bit of life is typed in blood across the page.

You see, I’m up late watching movies, and I realize I’m trapped in my own, an unfinished script caught in the pages between what was and what could be. The writers are on strike and the director can’t figure out what will happen after the shadows have leaked from the characters eyes.

I picture myself at a bar, the music dancing across my skin, the buzz of voices rolling loosely from inebriated tongues. I picture my eyes closed as I sway to the rush of bodies and the call of voices all around me. I listen to the story of it all, hear the possibilities pulsing in each person’s chest.

Because now I know that living is a lot like writing, you can never stop telling the story.

Even when your fingers grow tired, even when the lights go out, you can still hear its heartbeat, pounding in your chest.