There is a five-year-old girl in love. She is not in love with someone, for she is not yet old enough to understand such things. She is not even in love with life, truly, but she is in love with what life could be. She spends hours reading fairy tales about dragons and knights and princesses, rife with magic and gold and excitement. She wants to live a life like that. She wants to create a world like that.

There is a twelve-year-old girl who is not in love. Not with a person, not with what life is nor what it could be. In the night in which she exists, she waits for a sunrise she doesn't believe will come. And through it all, she clings to stories new and old, eager to find the light in a darkness she can't seem to escape.

There is a twenty-one year old woman, and she is in love again. Still not with a person. Not with what life could be, either. No, she is happy with the life that is. And in that, she dreams of the life that could be with a sense of nostalgic fondness. Those fantasies brought her through so many hardships, gave her joy and comfort in good times and bad. She still loves the stories even if she no longer needs to cling to them. Instead, she can hold them close with a sense of contentment, turn them over in her hands and examine them like a beautiful seashell.

I was once that girl, now a woman, who has always cherished stories. It was never enough to know those that others created–from the beginning, I sought to craft my own. To write is to create. To comfort. To explore both your own thoughts and the world around you.

After years of writing, I slowly came to a realization. Nobles and duels and sorcery are all well and good. An epic plot and a creative, immersive world are important. More than anything else, though, are the characters. The struggles, the despair and the ultimate triumph, the part of the story that truly makes it human–characters are the most important in a story.

That is why I write. Literature helped to keep me afloat during some of the darkest times in my life. Seeing the trials characters faced and their eventual success meant so much to me. It still does. And maybe I don't need those stories the way I did while I was growing up. Perhaps, now, I can instead focus on making my own, in some hope that they could provide relief to others in the way they once did to me. I’ve always thought that if I could write a story even one person would like, then I should write it. More than that, if I could write a story that even brought one person hope or comfort, then I must write it. 

To write is to create. To inspire. To attempt to simmer down the human essence into something as flimsy and yet beautiful as words. It is art and it is love and it is something to be loved. 

So for that five-year-old girl, that twelve-year-old girl, and for myself as I am now, I will write. Always.