It’s the mornings you wake up and the heaviness of your eyes are nothing compared to the heaviness in your chest. It’s the moments throughout the day you’re surrounded by all that love and adore you and you are still drowning in the loneliness. It’s the nights you lie awake wired with a megaphone prompter set to the highest volume in your skull repeating all of those thoughts you swore you’d never say aloud. It’s the seconds, the minutes, the hours, days, weeks, months that you feel as if you feel nothing in attempt to feel everything and you’re trying so hard to get to the surface of land while you’re drowning in the middle of the ocean, too heavy to swim. You see where you want to be and as you move every joint in your body, you’re going nowhere but down. Down. Down. Down to the bottom of your heart, down to the bottom of your stomach, to the bottom of your toes. The fuzzy feeling of a television on the fritz the black and white static going in and out, the blurry vision of nothing while all is in front of you and yet you are still sinking, drowning like the fish that can’t swim, you’re still watching that grayscaled fuzz and listening to the muffled up noises on the television that you can’t clearly make out while the remote is in your hands. That’s the worst part about it. That’s the ugly truth of it all. That our struggle, while it entails pain and chaos, we have the controls to change them. Our stories are complex. Maybe we can’t change the characters or the rising actions. It may be possible that the ****** is our of our control. We can’t do anything about how we got in the middle of the ocean, or how we turned the broken channel on, But within the falling action of it all, we can get ahold of it. We can grasp at it, tug on it, and we can morph it into our life jacket. We can build it into our own remote controler, we can change the perception of it all. The plot twists, the cliffhangers, those are what we can encompass and embrace, what we ourselves control and can incorporate to change the story. It is set in our mind’s eye how we perceive and annotate a story or poem just as it is set in our mind’s eye how we perceive and annotate our own story. Because in the end of it all, it comes down to what we are doing about it. Are we the ones putting rocks in our clothes so rather than our floating, we proceed to the very depths of suffocation? Are we the ones that pressed the volume button on the remote in order for the static to grow higher and higher to the point of deafness? As you reflect on your story, are you reading your metaphors right, are you interpreting the imagery and creative visualizations in a way that shows beauty within the ugly, are you appreciating the art of similes and detail that you were able to create throughout whatever your story entails? Or are you so engulfed in your ineptitude to look at the whole picture as just that, with no interpretation of it all? You only read your monologues rather than the dialogues within. You sparknoting your life. Have you ever taken an exam after sparknoting a book and it’s only when you have the lines of the paper in front of you that you realize that you know nothing? That’s what you’re doing when you only dwell on the obvious of your life. You’re not searching within to fill the plot holes and answering questions that are worth answering. Take advantage of syntax. The descriptions of the water, how cold it may feel emotionally and physically or why you can’t seem to turn the channel of your television when it’s only placing you in a realm of distress. You see what everyone sees, you know what everyone knows without ever understanding. It’s the words in between that tell a reader what to feel and why you feel that way. You’re cheating yourself out of individuality and the acceptance of a resolution worthy of acceptance. So as you write the rest of your story, write it in a way that will make you content with the ending. Give yourself an ending that you are satisfied with, that makes it easy to close the book and start on to the new one- because remember, you are not the only one reading it. Be proud of your story. Give your character the lifejacket. Give yourself the life jacket.