My words are not my own, but the echoes of a man who has long since died, and left to me in his will, a blueprint for how to live his life. I’d like to tell you that this death occurred at the site of a dashed love, believe me, I would. But the fact of the matter is, I simply do not know. And the lie I have clung to these many years has grown old and tired. So instead, I will tell you the truth, or attempt to.

For the last few years, I have not felt like myself. I have begun to question who “myself” truly is. Spare me any notions of a high school grad taking a year off of their studies to find themselves, I’m aware of the parallels and I despise them. I’ve spent far more than a year in this predicament and I would wish it upon no man. Yet someone has the audacity to believe they can discover the whole of what it means to exist in a year? Let alone believe such knowledge to be a benefit to them. The very notion has me shaking my head in sympathies!

But I digress. That is what I do after all. You see I am a writer by passion, but there is the problem, passion. For nearly a decade now my writing has felt lacking, hollow. Not to others apparently, but very much so for myself. Friends and loved ones tell me I write fairly well for someone of my age, but they do not know what I do. If they were privy to how the words sound before they reach the page, if only they could see how the world looks before I touch it, they would see how truly hollow my depictions are.

This is my problem. At one point, I felt comfortable with my own skill in creating a fantastical world. Now however I feel as if I am continually attempting to build the Taj Mahal, and getting credit for building the Hagia Sophia, or is it a table from Ikea? I can never remember.