The mirage vanishes into the murk alley and tears emerge on the surface of my pallid face.

A lone streetlight stands enlightened of the episodes to come. One star, against the blackness of the night, shines as if illusion were reality. Alone in the car, the engine roars in an ongoing Doppler. The moon illuminates the crevices in the windshield, illustrating years lived and lost. I reminisce. Nothing could have been that never were. No regrets. Never a what if. To live is to defy.

I drive a mirage. Before the mirage, I wrote. I formulated a dejected continuity of diction to dissolve happiness and fabricate pain. Sentences flowed and intersected neither the beginning nor the end. There were commas and semi colons separating miscellaneous ideas. To exhibit desire, I wrote of passion when imperturbability endured. To feel death, I wrote of affliction when vivacity existed. Experience with pretense is an adventure not many survive. Merely, black ink on white paper does not fill the exponential void. Nevertheless, I wrote. Ingenuously, I narrated the searching, not the owning. I penned feeling which lacked thinking. These counterfeit emotions and mythical soul sequences lynched my brain of substance. I failed.

I sit in my car and feel the east winds convoluting outside. I see my breath and notice that my tears have long since dried. All I am left with is salt residue resting intermittently upon my cheekbones. All I am left with is a leather-bound notebook in which to write the truth. The lies possess their own beauty and suave and resembled the truth in every way. But one. The lies are not edged in the stone of remembrance. The lies are not razor blades slashing at my wrists.

My hair, blonde and full, surrounds my head and covers my face. My hands are cramped, my eyes are dry, and my body is exasperated. I no longer wish for either comfort or pain. I wish to merely exist on the simplest operational level that satisfies my dreams and desires, my ambitions and longings. My niche in society is meaningless. My niche as an entity is paramount. Thus, I must write. I must write to fill a twenty-four hour void of nothingness. I must write to endure a moment’s blockade of everything.

As the engine roars, I write the millionth word for the first time. For the first time I write the truth. Clichй of drained adolescence is my youth not realized. Drugs never curbed my loneliness. Sexual indulgence never resulted in self-loathing. Yet mediocrity is not my safe haven. I live in a trance of continuity between candor and vice. Formulating a new genre in melody, I harmoniously arrange an indiscreet series of moments. Now, black ink on white paper fills the exponential void.

Black on white. Liquid thoughts transcribed on paper. The mirage vanishes into the murk alley and tears emerge on the surface of my pallid face.