I tuck caution into my pocket and hope I can reach for it if I need to.

This pen is my only outlet, my only voice, because I have no one else to speak to, no mind but my own to drown in and all the lifeboats are taken and all the life preservers are broken and I don't know how to swim I can't swim I can't swim and it's getting so hard. It's getting so hard. It's like there are a million screams caught inside of my chest but I have to keep them all in because what's the point of screaming if you'll never be heard and no one will ever hear me in here. No one will ever hear me again.

I am a being comprised of letters, a character created by sentences, a figment of imagination formed through fiction.

Friendship is not a thing I have ever experienced. Not as a child, and not as I am now.

His lips soften into a smile that cracks apart my spine. He repeats my name like the word amuses him. Entertains him. Delights him. In seventeen years no one has said my name like that

I spent my life folded between the pages of books. In the absence of human relationships I formed bonds with paper characters.

And some days I wonder why I insist on keeping myself alive.