Lilly

The other night, I dreamed that someone found my journal and showed it to everyone. Suddenly I was ringed with questioning eyes and razor blades for words, stinging like when you nick your shin in the shower. I didn’t know what they were talking about—for some reason I could barely remember what I had written. What I do remember now is tearing it out of someone’s hands and ripping out pages as fast as I could, crumpling them in my fist like destroying my words meant they had never existed at all.

I woke up sweating, the heat of my skin an odd contrast to the biting chill of the air in my room. I’m on the west wall, so my room basically acts as a buffer—it soaks up all the cold before it reaches the rest of the house. I spend most of my time in there anyway, wrapped up in blankets, all the lights on and my space heater humming away, trying to overcome the frost forming on my windows. I like winter, but sometimes I think it doesn’t like me.

I’ve been locking myself away because I’ve been trying to write, but since that dream nothing has been coming. I’ll sit in front of a blank page or a cursor blinking cruelly from an empty Word document and wait for something to click in my head. Even these short paragraphs took hours, as if the cold is slowing down my brain.

I know it’s just a slump and it’ll pass. But I wish it weren’t so cold. I wish I weren’t so numb. ♦