I am not an original and that is exactly my problem. I fall in love with types of people I've never seen before, people with interesting names and scars and stories, people whose eyes or hair or hands are unforgettable, people who speak and leave their words stamped onto the edges of your ribs and the tissues of your brain, people who are so unapologetically who they are that it's impossible not to be intoxicated by them. And I am. Intoxicated, I mean. I meet these people and become fixated on the way their necks flow into their shoulders and the way their knuckles are scarred from the kind of accomplishments I will never know and the way that they are so different from anything I know. I meet these people, so many of them, and at the end of the day I lie on my floor trying and failing not to fall apart because I can't get them out of my system and I will never be in theirs. They are so unapologetically who they are, and I apologize for every word that comes out of my mouth and every gesture I make. When I was younger I just wanted to be accepted, so I tried so hard to be like everyone else and now that I want to be my own person, I can't. I am a repeat of every song I have ever heard, an echo of every word ever said to me, a copy of every book I have ever read. I am walking plagiarism, and that fact of my existence is what causes me to tear myself apart in a useless effort to build myself up to something new.