Paper Veins

I am innocence and the world desperately wishes to corrupt me.

So I vanish into fiction. I escape into pages that offer me solace and relief and distraction from each new heaviness that life is only too happy to provide.

Then, I learn the darkness lingers there too: in chapters, in paragraphs. Writers pour their own pain into the pages and I cannot escape it. So I write.

I write miles between myself and reality’s corrosion. Still, it catches up. It catches me. It always does. Always will.

We readers, writers: we all bleed the same.

We all bleed ink.