I have this problem that isn’t really a problem, but more of an itch left unscratched in a part of my brain too deep to reach for any results. I buy journals: so many journals, lured in by smooth binds of goatskin and leather and thick parchment pages. Hypnotized by the promise of empty space for me and me alone to fill, a 5 x 7 rectangle of nothingness to unload the accumulating garbage in my head onto.

I never write in them.

Pages starved of the ink they were meant to sustain, doomed as dust gatherers by my own unexamined hesitation. What would I write? What secrets would fill those pages that I am so reluctant to grant them physical form? Sometimes I chalk it up to laziness: simple, plain, normal. But in truth, the fact is I’m afraid to relive everything. Both dark days and bright, to give them form in reality is to grant power to my thoughts and memories, to force me to search for meaning, to answer all the how’s and why’s. Questions I’d rather leave blank.

My own personal vice, a quirk strictly my own—Brianna, hoarder of empty notebooks, afraid of deriving some kind of tangible, meaningful notion from the past.

I like to believe that I regret nothing, that this life of pain, self-deterioration and utter helplessness has contributed to who I am. I am proud of this person, me, this confused girl, this disturbed woman, in a world full of light and darkness with no shades of grey. But who doesn’t wonder how things would have carried on if “this” or “that” happened differently? If it never happened at all?

My life and my past are beautiful and horrible in all the best and worst ways. It’s a story full of irony, of tragedy, of love; a thriller, a romance, a tragic dystopian ballad.

There has been death, but from each grave grows a sapling hungry for sun. There has been pain—mental, physical and emotional, each with its own brand of mesmerizing terror—but from the agony I’ve garnered strength—again, mental, physical and emotional. There have been apologies, each one forgiven, there have been I can’t’s followed up by I can’s. There has been nothing and everything all at once, I have hated it and loved it, this arcane kaleidoscope that is my life and all life.

I had to crawl to live, so I stood and died and reborn again and again. I savor the bliss of chaos, perfectly content.

In spite of faults, the past is just that: unchangeable, unfixable, omnipotent in its power to make human beings feel. So why analyze it? Why write about it? Bliss of chaos. Beauty of confusion. Life is no article to be annotated, it is life, glorious and befuddling. To outline it for the satisfaction of a journal willed with meaningless words is to destroy the phantasmagoria that is the universe and its ability to nurture the living.

It’s the actual memories that matter, the taste, the touch, the smell, the feel of each and everyone. It’s something so special that no amount of my pretty words can accurately describe it.

I am a writer of fiction. A spinner of unreal tales. A weaver of people, their loves, their values, their problems. I indulge in the power to create worlds at the tip of a pen, not reflect on something real, on a story already written. True life is intangible, a sacred story for your mind’s eye only, a screenplay in a foreign language only you and your God can understand.

My life does not consist of two parts but three: past, present, future. It’s true that I could die tomorrow, right now, before I cross my T’s and dot my I’s, but still in this moment my future is there. I am not writer of biographies.

Nor am I a writer of stories unfinished.