365 Days (Part 1) | ✓

16. Addict

16. Addict: Everyone's addicted to something in some shape or form. What are things you can't go without?

Words. Words that flow through the sticky ink in a pen and and brought to life by spells called letters. Words that build and ruin. Words that impact like a thousand men with a battering ram... and words that pass gently by, undetected except by that faint disturbance in the air that is understanding. Words that touch you in your beating heart, in your aching soul, in the deepest regions of you that you yourself can never reach, but the words can. Words that take who you are and expose it, handing you out to the world like a naked babe with raw, rubbed flesh. Words that heal the cracks in you like a plaster or a glue; sealing you together so you can face another day. Words that hurt you, throwing their sharp points and scattering the broken fragments into a thousand irreparable pieces.

I am addicted to words.

An addiction is both desperately needed and hatefully unwanted. I hate this. I hate the feverish intensity that possesses me to write these all-powerful words. I hate that I keep doing it. I hate that I would give up so much for the sake of the words. I hate that, even though they disobey me and strangle me, I still love words.

Words don't work for me. They don't go where I want them to go. They dance and wiggle and squirm, until they have misconstrued my meaning entirely. Then I am left, abandoned by the words, deprived of the power that allowed me to write the words, and exhausted with the effort of trying to convert what is insubstantial into language. I cannot change love into a description. Nor can I describe the potency of hate. Yet I give of my entire being to complete the effort, and I wrestle and struggle with an unforseen enemy (myself), and in the end of all of this, what do I get?

A story.