In the Waiting Room of My Mind

This is how I make things: from borrowed grief, from futures I've already mourned.

My creative process looks like this: a room full of smoke where nothing's burning yet.

I write elegies for people still laughing in the next room.

I compose the soundtrack to endings that exist only in the rough draft of my racing thoughts.

Every blank page becomes a vigil.

Every brushstroke, a kind of dress rehearsal for loss I've memorized but never lived.

They say write what you know, but I write what I'm terrified to know.

The hospital corridor I've walked a thousand times while brushing my teeth.

The funeral I've attended in the shower, while making coffee, while pretending to listen to someone tell a story about their weekend.

Why do I create? Maybe to cage the futures that prowl around my bed at 3 AM.

To pin them down with metaphor and meter, as if making art from fear could make it less real, or more bearable, or at least give it somewhere else to live besides the cramped apartment of my chest.

I refine ideas the way you'd handle evidence at a crime scene, carefully, obsessively, looking for proof that the worst thing isn't coming.

My editing process: crossing out catastrophes, replacing them with slightly different catastrophes.

Finding the perfect word for grief, I've invented from whole cloth and shadow.

The truth is, I've lived more tragedies in my mind than most people survive in a lifetime.

I am a veteran of wars that never started, a widow to someone still kissing me goodnight, an orphan with parents who text me memes.

And still, I come back to the blank page, the empty canvas, the silence before the first note.

Because maybe creation is the only country where my suffering serves a purpose, where all this borrowed sorrow becomes something besides waste.

Where the weight I carry in advance might transform into words someone else recognizes in their own small hours.

We create again and again because the present tense can't hold us.

Because imagination is both a curse and a cure, the wound and the hand that tries to heal it.

I write to survive the deaths that haven't happened.

I write to practice staying alive.