Why after 22 years I’m still that fourteen year old kid

It’s as if the breath comes and then nothing comes after it. I breath and know I’m breathing and yet, somehow, it’s not complete. I see myself in the mirror and stare at the reflection waiting for something to happen. Something I know should happen, but doesn’t.

This feeling comes and goes with days and nights. It’s the writer’s torment. Staring in the mirror at this person who calls himself a writer and yet. isn’t published. It’s one of life’s little things that makes us wonder. Are we kidding ourselves? Does it really work like this? Am I really doing this or have I stepped out and some alien face sucker has attached itself and is running my body while my mind is…occupied.

I’m not sure. But I know staring at my reflection has given me things I never thought of. I’ve managed to organize my desk, my writing and have taken things I’ve done in the context for which they were meant.

I don’t see the tired almost forty year old man. I still see the fourteen year old kid full of dreams of becoming a writer. Those days come and go, but mostly, lately they’ve been plentiful.

I wait along the rows of other authors who haven’t been published, but who work diligently day and night to keep the words flowing in ribbons of gold. So, like Rumpelstiltskin, we spin our gold. Not from straw, but from the air and everything around it.

Seeing ourselves as we want to be. Avoiding the looks and discussions of, “When’s your book getting published?” or “Did you finish your book?”. It’s these things, these statements and questions that make me feel like an charlatan in the middle of the Spanish Inquisition.

I feel only the words and the dream of that fourteen year old boy. His blue eyes still full of wonder. His mind no longer clogged with false ideology or lies. He comes to me at night, whispers in my ear, “Write Brian, because you were born to.”