For it would mean admitting how dissatisfied I am with our world, and with our existence.

To give in fully to the bliss of my heart would incur such great melancholy and despair; to allow my heart to fly and soar to the heights of euphoria it is capable of would make the heaviness of my vessel all the more clear. How long can a bird in a cage fantasize about freedom, about spreading its wings and tasting open air, before relinquishing and accepting its confines?

I guess I’m afraid of wanting, for to want is too vulnerable a thing.

To let myself dream would make me weep at my waking reality.

And of what would I dream? What might my fiction, my written falsehoods, convey, in truth, about me?

Might every single thing I translate into my fiction be a mirror image of the ways in which I am unsatisfied?

When I illustrate with words my inner vision, my own epic tale of being a powerful hero, I am then really telling you how impotent, helpless, powerless, and out of control I really feel —

When I write a tale of pure, sweet, and rich love, I’m telling you how cold my heart has been —

But, when I write a story of darkness taking over the land, and a reign of fear casting a thick shroud, a weighted, crushing blanket, fire retardant to the spark of spirit contained by all humanity, evident in the posture of all, with curved upper backs, heads trained on the exact point the tyrant king would like to pin all beings towards,

Then I am telling things exactly as I see them to be. Then, I am telling you about the being who has made me afraid to hope, afraid to want — afraid to stand up, for fear of being smacked back down.

But, if I cannot defeat my captor even in fantasy, how could I ever dream of doing so elsewhere?

It is easier to convince oneself they’ve never wanted at all, than to face the crushing, painful awareness that the desire of one’s heart is not met.

This is why I am afraid to write fiction. I am afraid of love; I am afraid of how deeply I love. I am afraid of wanting; I am afraid of how deeply I want. I am afraid of how deeply I need, how deeply I hurt, how deeply unsatisfied I truly am, and to conceive of a realm in which that is not the case may make the painful burden of the reality I am currently in too much to bear…

But, with this awareness, of course I’ll not remain actionless. With the profundity of this realization, what else is there to do but write fiction? What else is there to do but face that blissful, glorious ache of my heart?

What else is there to do but rip off the bandaid, taking hair with it, my desires like maggots having festered upon my flesh, ready to be unleashed upon the world… ugly, brooding, preferential to the dead, dark, and damp, not quite ready to see the light of day, but not quite, now, with a say in the matter…