It was barely dawn when I woke up with an ominous sense of dread nestled in my breast. I thought that I ought to get ready, but I rarely had the energy anymore. Maybe I never would. Maybe I’d be stuck in numb, fuzzy grey static until the end.

I padded out of my room in stocking feet, pausing and sucking in a sharp breath when a stair creaked loudly. Guilt flooded my eyes, even though none of the other girls would mind. Come to think of it, they could very well be somewhere else completely, wrapped up in the sleet-blue sheets of a boy they met once before. 

Careful to be quiet anyway, I made my way to the office. I hunched over the typewriter uncomfortably. The pure, blank paper asked me why I was awake at four in the morning, why not go back to bed? I suddenly felt very tired.

I stared at it for a moment longer before I began. I had a deadline to meet. Besides, I had been tossing and turning in bed for an hour before I got up. 

It was a biting winter morning…

Nope. I could practically hear my editor’s voice screaming, “Elementary! So, very elementary!”

I would feel fire lick the inside of my stomach, manifesting itself as burning restlessness. “Come on, girlie,” she would say, condescending and smug. “You can do better.”

Angrily, I ripped the ruined sheet from its paper guide. I crumpled it in my fist, knuckles going white. 

'Oh, I don't think anything could heal my broken heart.'

“Dialogue as an intro? I expected more from you.”

Buzzz!

Onomonopea. The favorite technique of a pupil still of age for corduroy teddies and is worried about cooties. “If you wanna make it big, you gotta act your age, sweetheart. Try something flowery. People seem to like that nowadays, what with the Flintstones TV show and all that.” She was an avid hater of the Flinstones.  

I wanted to write some transformative parable, not stuff made up of sugar and clouds, but thus far I had proven myself incapable of such aspirations.

I decided that I needed to keep this job. It was supposed to make me find fulfillment and be brilliantly happy, wasn't it? That was how it happened in the movies. The only way to find out was to meet my deadline. 

I put my mind to flowers. 

The sunlight danced through jade trees in angelic golden-yellow heat. 

“No, no, no! This is cliché and unimaginative!” The editor told me.

I abruptly burst into tears. I was bubbling like a kettle and bitter as dandelion tea. 

“Stop!” I wept audibly into the dark and encompassing room.

I cried until I felt numb and truly uninspired. Maybe she was right about me. I was suffocating like Catherine Earnshaw or even, from a newly-published book, Esther Greenwood. I sat in the darkness of a damp office for what could have been minutes or hours, my eyes burning fiercely. 

Cliché,

unimaginative,

elementary.

“I don’t know why you expect I can do this! 

I CANT!" 

But instead of her harsh critique, A new voice whispered in my ear. “Write how you feel,” my daddy said in his old drawl I missed so dreadfully. “It can’t get simpler than that princess.” Golly, I missed him. When he passed, a part of my heart passed, too; the part that loves and dreams.

“Please?” he added.

I swallowed bile, but I found myself wanting to make my beautiful father proud even in death. My knee bobbed up and down as I carefully crafted a simple note:

Where happiness once was, there is nothing; the little girl who once blushed pink and sweet like a strawberry cake is only rain and oatmeal. Life itself has become ordinary. I do not wish for her to be gone, but she is. I want to find her. I have hope that somewhere far away, she may still be hiding. Perhaps it is time for me to turn from a chapter I have dwelt in so long and find a new story of hope and light and rediscovery. Or a new fairytale altogether, a fresh beginning.