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‘Give me the punchline.’

‘I don’t have one,’ she said lazily.

‘Then what’s your problem? Tell me from the top of your head.’

‘I think I don’t have a subject to write.’ She knew even as she said it that it wasn’t true. And she knew he knew it better than her.

‘You have a subject. You always have a subject. Having a keen sense of observation – such as yours – means you get to view everything in the world around you as a subject…from a stone on the ground to the masked people walking around like puppets crying on the inside.’

‘So tell me what your real problem is.’

She had no answer. It was as simple and as complicated as that.

When people are happy, they don’t want to write. Why would they stop having a good time and sit down to write? On the other hand, words come easy when the mind is a playground for the soldiers of depression and everything charcoal-colored like that. But that wasn’t the case with her. Writing was something she could and wanted to do in both happy and sad times.

‘Is it because you have too many subjects?’ he asked her, clearly not given up.

‘Perhaps.’ The ground looked more vibrant than her heart felt.

‘Or is it because the weight of battling the war within you is so tiring, it leaves you with no energy to think about what to write?’

‘More or less. But not quite,’ she answered.

‘Is it because the silence of nothingness is too loud to make out words your mind is uttering?’ he asked again.

‘Again, more or less but not exactly.’

‘Or is it because you want to be absolutely nothing, since that is always easier to fulfill?’

‘Somewhat…’ her ears were ringing with disdain.

Truth be told, it was a little bit of all these reasons.

Words are weapons, she told him. She needed hers to hurt her, because pain reminds her that she is real in this illusionary, temporary world. That she has to be real all through the way. So when her words come out and don’t feel like weapons that inflict the strictest amount of pain on her mind, she does not want to write them down.

And it was as simple and as complicated as that.

The next question would be so as to why her mind often didn’t conjure up words that were indeed weapons, but just fragile feathers that barely touched her skin and fell to the ground right after their birth. The answer to this would lead to further questions. So she closed the book and began improving the weapons she’d made so far.

Because it was as simple and as complicated as that.