The Secret

Early mornings in Brooklyn, he asks for your eyes but all you have are excuses. Hold tight to the scribbles in your hands, the collection of paper scraps in your bag, hold tight to the stories in your head, they are all you have now. For a brief moment, you grazed what it was to be human, to follow the arc so obvious for most and so perpetually foreign to you, but that moment is gone now, it wasn't yours to hold. All that remains are these words in your chest, maybe they are all there ever was, maybe you were fooling yourself to think you'd made room for someone else to move in. I'm sorry I smiled at you in that way that made you believe I was giving you the stars, I'm not sharing them anymore. There's a bar stool with my name on it, there's a rambling empty street in New York City with my footprints all over it, there's a story somewhere in the Universe with my voice in it and the only thing that matters now is that I remember how to tell it.

The secret to writing a novel is
write it.
The secret to living a life is
live it.
I have had enough of our excuses.