The Roughest Draft

by Emily Wibberley

No matter how much success you’ve had, insecurity is never far from reach when you’re being judged on pieces of your soul.

Except “baggage” shouldn’t be the metaphor for this sort of thing, because you can put baggage down. When you’re weary or your hand hurts, you can say “wait up” and drop the baggage to the ground until you’re ready to carry on.

love wasn’t just the sum of those parts, but rather the exponent on the end of the equation,

I’ve heard people compare fights to fire. It’s the wrong metaphor. Flames flourish with space, openness, room to breathe, kindling to feed them. Fights come from the opposite—from pressure, restraint, deprivation. What I need is to open a release valve and vent some of this pressure.

“Forever is about reaching into the future, into years far away and unknowable. ‘Always’ is about every second of every day. It’s as far-reaching as ‘forever,’ it just starts sooner.”

Imagine how different our lives would be if you could speak your feelings instead of only writing them.

Writing is where our—where everyone’s—purest truths lie. On the page, thoughts and feelings can be expressed without interference, without ineloquences or fear or fumbling. There’s no room for turning back or losing your nerve. Only one thing remains—what you want to communicate.

Fiction comes from truth. It is a wonderful, imaginative, flourishing thing grown from a seed of real feelings, real desires, real fears. No artist ever creates from nothing.

Sometimes life is stranger than fiction, but sometimes it’s incomparable in other ways. Sometimes it’s a heaven that the false fire of imagination could never capture.

I love even our roughest draft. I love every fraught page we’ve rewritten to get to here. Because in the end, the best part of a love story isn’t having it. It’s getting to keep writing.