There’re two things to know about me:
I’m a twenty-something girl,
And my favorite character is the complicated one.
I write lots of stories and never really recorded my own,
And what I do write is trash because I spend all my days alone.
I’m the only one I know who thinks so hard inside my head
That I can’t get out of and start to wonder if
This is, every night, how I’ll go to bed.
In the stories I read, there’s a clearer objective,
But I’m not a book, even though we’re similar––
Thousands of words hiding under covers,
Dark in the corners,
Collecting dust and wondering who will read us.
What makes a story?
Like I said, in my kind of book, I like the
Complicated one.
I like love interests, and boys for best friends,
And shy girls and twenty-somethings who don’t blend in.
Suppose I live in a storybook of my own,
And that’s why I’m a mess of wet paper that used to be
A pretty manuscript,
And now I must be rewritten.
I see you, people who tell me I’m not okay.
I hear you wondering how I am today.
It’s just that in stories, they get with the boys.
They all settle down and stop moving around,
And why can’t that be me?
Writing my own story, making my own ending.
Suppose in this storybook, the complicated one falls in love.
The Complicated goes mad with emotions and
Hides under the covers with new words to write.
They slice and pry through the scars of last year’s words,
Full of Atlanta and Charlotte and love that’s sudden and absurd.
The twenty-something stops failing and starts reaching the end,
And suppose it isn’t as bad as she thought,
Because she likes big city freestyle and the interstate at night,
And skyscrapers and airplanes, and––wait a second––
Holding his hand feels right.
Is this the ending? Is she the book?
Because it looks like she’s going to make it.
The complicated twenty-something, turns out, is her favorite.
M.M. Cochran is a YA writer and author of Between the Ocean and the Stars (summer 2022). With an educational background in English and creative writing, she has worked in the journalism industry, as well as the agenting and publishing industry, and she is currently a freelance book editor for her service, Elegant Editing. Now pursuing a career in publishing and becoming a full-time novelist, she spends most of her time editing and writing in her novels. Meanwhile, you can find M.M. collecting coffee mugs or slipping into an oversized sweater, wishing for a white winter.
Featured Image by Andrea Piacquadio from Pexels
