What remained of the blackened bookshelves towered like a dead forest: rooted in the ashes where they had burned.

The library was gone. Utterly obliterated.

Covers and pages crumbled to grey powder; the wind scattered it, and carried clouds of it off into the night.

Only one tome was fortunate enough to escape the blaze. It sat, unscathed, in one corner – enshrined in wood that still smoldered.

A skeleton – dark symbols freshly seared into each bone – sprawled face down across its open pages.

Its jawbone wiggled, and the dim embers flickering within its eye sockets grew brighter.

“Damn,” the skeleton said. “That was one hell of a cookbook.”

Fog given flesh, given form,

my mind manifests these incandescent dreams

and shades I beg to bury.

A driftwood forest dies on the dark shore;

I bleed out all my secrets and wishes and fears – pelt the thirsty sand –

and when I’m empty the shells and pebbles sigh for more.

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.