She wrote. She wrote in gold on silver-leafed pages with the memories bleeding on the page in sparkling ink. She wrote like she never had, watching the metallic glimmering against the dull, yellowed, dust-covered sheets whose lines were just avenues she’d yet to discover. She wrote like she was in love. And for the first time in forever, she was. She wrote like she had more than just a story to tell and memories to escape. She wrote like she meant every word, like she would never again let the liars and thieves break into her life and destroy it like they did so long ago. And as she wrote, she protected him. She protected the one she cared about, shielding him from the pain of it all. The pain she’d once felt herself. She wrote of loyalties and passions and dances in the dark. Of Taylor swift songs and moments shared in more ways than one. She wrote to hide the ones she loved from the cruelty of the world, stubborn tears and weighty conversations falling from her mouth and mind onto the page. Her mind was a dagger wielded by her heart in an irresponsible, volatile attempt to unify what was breaking. She wrote of her trust and her devotion, her fear and her worry, her desire to run. To run from it all. She wrote a detailed guide in the art of self-loathing and deprecation, her years as a cynic coming blissfully into play as she let it pour out of her fingertips. She wrote like her very soul would shatter if she did anything otherwise. She wrote like any second a storm would come and crash into the lighthouse she’d built to protect it all. Walls are only as strong as the forces behind them. She wrote and even though she saw the waves coming and felt the winds whipping and the salt spraying in the air, as she heard the howl of a storm that was destined to destroy her, she wrote. And as she wrote she began a new phase of her life. She was broken and so was he, but she couldn’t run from herself anymore. She wrote, knowing that she couldn’t love another if she couldn’t love herself beforehand. She wrote, transforming into who she was destined to become. As she brought herself to do the things she never thought she could, to say the things she’d been terrified to say, she didn’t smile like the shy author she’d once been. She would never again let her life end with a final flourish of a punctuation dot, a cruel and dark mark on a life that couldn’t be defined by something so simple. She wrote as a way of calling out, as writing was her way of speaking. She wrote because it was the only safe space where she could run to the edge of a cliff and scream. She wrote, reopening old wounds and examining herself from the inside out, the harrowing truths of herself becoming plainly manifest on the page. She wrote as it was her refuge. She wrote and as she did she healed. She apologized and forgave herself for all those years of self-hatred, replacing all the cruel words that had invaded her mind and heart with the words she knew to be true, the words she’d wanted to be true, but didn’t have the strength to look inside of herself and see it. She wrote to admit to herself that she was worth so much more than what she’d been told by society for her entire life. She wrote, her perfect wallflower mind blissfully creating what she wanted and needed to hear. She wrote and wrote despite the storm blasting in her soul and in the world around her, she knew that she would never let them take from her what she’d come to know. She wrote as her life wasn’t a beautiful, stunning creation that could be summed up by a simple punctuation dot. She wrote as her life was a messy, sh*tty, broken, and utterly spent existence that would only be summarized by a comma as it implied a whole other thought was coming. She wrote and let her pen fall into its inkwell, her final sentence left unfinished as she rose and faced her fears. She left her pen and her notebooks, their pages splattered with the golden ink of her recent reinvention, her mind clear as she left her writing behind for a time. Her sudden screaming through her pen giving her the strength to live.