It's not easy being a writer.

You have no idea what you're going to feel on any given day. You snap at people you love, smile at people you hate, and play mind games just for the hell of it. You comb through pages and pages of dusty volumes, through mp3 file sharing programs, and through rows of empty eyed people looking for that spark. You don't know what it is necessarily, but when you find it, all the hairs on your body stand at attention in respect, all the fluid inside you leaps up in a tide of welcome, and your heart screams out like a siren, "I need you!"

You are a parasite. You are a vampire. You suck the life out of every minute, break everything you can get your hands on to see what makes it tick, and trip over your own feet on purpose again and again, just hoping it will give you something to put on paper. You stand alone in a flock of laughing people, not quite getting it, scribbling away furiously on your mental Post-It notes. You stare at a freshly peeled onion for hours, watching the face of God dart in and out between the mystery that started out unseen and unfelt on this ordinary day.

You scream and rock and shake and tear your own inner walls down in fits of temporary insanity before passing out in a pool of blood and expression through writing. You hurt yourself so you will know what it's like to feel. You go places you know you shouldn't, talk to people you know are dangerous, and kiss lips laced with poison. And you can't stop.

Beauty has many imposters. You never know when you're going to produce something that in 5 years will sound like it came from the bowels of ignorance. Around any number of infinite corners there are people waiting to make a fool of you because they've been on the carousel longer and been knocked off more times. Drama wants to make you look like a blamed idiot; sin wants to make you the outcast; popularity wants to make you yesterday's news; insecurity wants to make you lose your mind.

But there is one consolation.

The Muse loves fools. She loves people who are borrowing time from broken clocks. She picks you up from the dirt, dusts you off, and gives you just one smile: and for that smile you would walk across a million glass shards. You would waste your last penny in a wishing well just to be filled with her fire. You would lie in your room under the moonlight in the fetal position, every second passing like a slap across your exposed skin, and you love every blow. You will be utterly busted, absolutely torn, entirely lost:

And you will never want to be anything else but what you are: an eternal servant of the Muse. A writer.