I’m sitting on the linoleum in my kitchen because the cold is the only thing keeping me awake, and if I go to sleep now, tomorrow becomes real.
There is a sticky spot near the base of the refrigerator that I’ve been meaning to clean since Thursday.

I don’t even know what it is. Maple syrup, maybe, or soda. I’m just staring at it, watching a tiny piece of dust float down and get stuck to it, thinking about how easily things get ruined when you just let them sit.

My laptop is open on the counter above me. The battery is at four percent. The screen is casting a pale, bluish light across the cheap cabinets, and every ten seconds the cursor blinks. It feels like a tiny, digital finger tapping me on the shoulder, reminding me that I have absolutely nothing left to say.

The draft up there is supposed to be the “defining piece” of my portfolio. That’s what I told my brother. That’s what I told myself when I bought a sixty-dollar notebook I didn’t need, thinking a leather cover would somehow make my thoughts look important. I spent the last three weeks constructing this elaborate, intellectual persona on the page. I used words like “juxtaposition” and “inherent.” I structured paragraphs to build up to these little, neat revelations that sounded like things people say at parties when they want to seem deep.
And then I read it tonight. Really read it, without the self-flattering filter.
It is so incredibly fake.

It reads like a pamphlet written by a committee trying to simulate human emotion. It’s the literary equivalent of a model home—everything is clean, perfectly placed, and completely uninhabitable. I wrote it to get applause from people I don’t even like, and in the process, I forgot how to just say a normal, honest sentence.
That is the loop I keep getting stuck in.

I start a project because I feel a genuine spark—something small and ugly and real—and then the second I think about someone else looking at it, I start polishing it. I sand down the rough edges. I paint over the stains. By the time I’m done, the original thing is completely gone, replaced by this shiny, hollow replica that doesn’t breathe.