3o'clock (CNF-Dialogue)

It was about three o'clock in the morning, and the boy was still awake, playing video games on his laptop. He saw that one of his friends had joined his teamspeak line, so he turned on his headset and greeted him.
"Hey dude, why you up so late?" He himself had only just realized the time, and rubbed his eyes wearily.
"Dunno, guess I'm just like you that way."
The boy raised and eyebrow and scratched his head, knocking a finger against his mic then regaining composure. "Watcha mean?" He yawned sleepily as he waited for a reply.
"I don't sleep when I'm thinkin' either." A muffled cough sounded through the microphone, and the boy stared at his screen in silence.
"Well, watcha thinkin' about?" The boy bit his lip and forced his eyes open to stay awake. He rubbed one eye and yawned silently once more.
"Just uh, I've been kinda... I broke up with my girlfriend."
For a while there was silence, and the boy noticed another cough and a sniff. He shook himself to stay awake.
"Oh... well uh, hang in there man. I mean, what happened, anyway?" The boy listened hard for a response, and heard muffled cursing in the background. A can was crushed, and another was opened not five seconds later.
"Screwed up...I don't really want to talk about it." Three gulps, then another can in the trash.
The boy just stared at his keyboard a while in thought, panicking about what he should do. "Alright... so uh, you wanna play Minecraft?" A hopeful smile dashed across the boy's face, wondering how his friend would react.
"Nah, not really..." Nothing but static came in for a few moments, then another cough.
The boy rubbed his hand against his face and sighed. "Alright, what about..."
A click and a pause informed the boy that his friend had left. He closed his laptop slowly and slid it to the floor, along with his headset. He stared at the mic a while, just thinking. Then he drifted off to sleep.

Recollection (CNF-Nostalgia)

Everyone has memories, whether they are good, bad, or pointless. When it comes to me, only bad memories seem to surface. Every one of the fond memories just seems to drip away, making more and more room for new good times. Instead, I warn myself about repeating the past; crushing my leg under a fallen bookshelf, soaking my blood-stained broken bone in the tub as I waited for the emergency room trip to commence. I remind myself to step away from the creaking trunk of the tree my friends pushed around as I watched wide-eyed, seeing it fall towards me like a tripped giant. I tell myself to call the police when my neighbors get robbed, not to run away like a coward. Those are only a few examples of the things I remember; the iron smell of blood in water as tears stung my eyes, trying to escape while my throat was still closed in pain. I think back to the ear-shattering crack of wood as leaves spilled onto the ground around me, signaling the blackness of unconsciousness. I regret the cowardly decision of running as I heard frantic gunshots and furious yelling next door, my trembling legs barely keeping me standing as a solitary car honked past me. But along with those memories come some of my best. The feeling of pride when I held back my tears in the hospital, ringing pain in my ears from the bone that stood out of my skin like a bleeding baton. The thought that my friends dragged me out from under the tree and waited in terror for me to wake up, not even thinking to get an adult. And most of all, the night air brushing softly against my skin as I hid and prayed desperately for our neighbor’s safety, soon hearing the triumphant shouts of an old man and his shotgun, tires shrieking against the road as more cowards fled. With every bad memory comes a good one, for me at least. And that’s why I cherish even the worst.

CNF- Growing is Forever

When people tell you to reach for the stars, they think they know how to do that. As if they've done it before. But has anyone truly touched the stars? I like to believe so, but usually most people tend to stretch themselves out too far, and in the process of shooting for the heavens, they forget their original motives. There's really no room for improvement in a world where everyone sits on the ground, though, and when the others collapse in front of them is discourages them from standing. So we just sit here, watching everyone reach for the stars and eventually trip... But my money will always be on those people grabbing the stars and rubbing them in our faces.

Hey, Kid!

Hey kid. Yes, you. Listen to me for a minute. You don’t understand how life works yet, do you? Of course not, you’re you. So let me clue you in a bit; nothing is free. Everything requires hard work. Baffled yet? Probably not, so let me elaborate. Whenever you do something it affects your life. Whenever you don’t do something, it affects it more. You’ll fail over and over no matter what, but if you don’t try at all you’ll just suck too much. So get working. The more you slack off the worse you’ll be when you actually put in effort; the fun isn’t worth it. You’re wasting too much time and you’ve got to stop it or you’ll be extremely frustrated with everything you attempt in the future. And believe me, I know a lot about the future… we’ve got iPhones.
    So get to work. Write more, draw more, and save all the money you get. I don’t care if you want a Gameboy, you won’t care later. If you don’t start caring about the future, you’ll never get the present right. And for god’s sake, start working out. It doesn’t matter if you’re lazy, it’ll make you less lazy in the future. Scared yet? I would be. Or I am… or was…wait, what?

Eyes Wide Open

Life is always so fragile. The insects in the world die faster than we even step on them, and animals in the wild often struggle to survive. But every day, every minute, we humans become stronger. We live on, unlike everything else, and we manage to do something with our lives as well. We attempt to make the world a better place, making the old turn into the new. Even if our species begins to die, our monuments will keep us alive forever, and no doubt will we rise again.

But why us? What did the other forms of life do to live their meager, helpless lives? Not to say animals are no use in the world, but why aren't they civilized as well? Some religions say that they were once bad people, who now cannot partake in civil actions alongside humans, but didn't we evolve from them? This is why humans can accomplish anything if they put their minds to it; we aren't animals anymore. Millions of yeas ago, we deserved nothing. But we fought for what we needed, and we still can today. Whether you're fighting in a war or writing a novel, you're human. Whether you're in the olympics or programming a video game, you're human.
And that's all you need.

Why I Write

Why I Write

            There’s only ever been one reason I write, and that’s because I enjoy it. Originally, in about fourth grade, I decided that I wanted to set my entire life on one track. Being exceptional at a few things was too boring for me; I wanted to be absolutely perfect at just one, spectacular thing. So I searched for what interested me, what wasn’t too drab. Drawing and painting, math and science, it was all too common. I soon realized that I hated everything I was good at; there was no room for improvement, no room for discovery. I wanted to be good at something that I had never done before, something that I was awful at so that I could go from the bottom to the top. And that one thing was writing.

            When I was in about fifth grade, my only option was to read. English classes gave me no good information about writing at all, so I read tons of books about fantasy, war and anything a little kid would find exciting. Every once in a while I would put what I knew to the test, attempting and failing miserably to write the same way. I was frustrated, because the words never worked. They stood stock-still, refusing to flow like the words of all good stories. Of course, I was only in the fifth grade, so the expectations I had of my own writing were extremely high. Nevertheless, I continued to go about my regular routine.

            Soon, between sixth and seventh grade, I began to take my writing more seriously. After a bit of studying, I realized what writing was really about. I thought about how no great writer has written about someone else’s experience and been able to put it to their own words efficiently. I stopped trying to copy the books I read, and I wrote entirely out of my own thoughts. Contrary to what I believed, each one of my stories seemed to end up turning dark. Characters died, villains destroyed cities, and the end was almost never happy. No main character was ever a hero; just a simple, normal person who was sucked into a terrible catastrophe. When I learned how I naturally wrote and thought, I tried to perfect that style and stick to it. I told stories that never had happened, but they were in reference to real life events. I read more books about people who struggled, fighting their way through a sea of evil that never ceased, although they had never done a thing to deserve it. I was fascinated in how I wrote this way, even though nothing had ever happened to me. That’s when it hit me; I was an observer.

            Of course, this was just a short name to a complex way of life. To put it simply, I had done nothing but watch the world and everyone in it evolve in character, slowly becoming who they always were. Well, at the time it seemed simple. Anyhow, all of my characters acted the same way I’ve seen many of those around me, which is why they’ve never been heroes before. As I began to perfect this form of writing at the beginning of seventh grade, I knew that my writing career was coming closer and closer every day.

            After a lot of preparation, I decided to go further with my writing and step away from my comfortable corner of a single genre, and I tried to repeat what I had done before. I read books, found genres and wrote using them and them only; most of which failed and didn’t interest me in the slightest. But even now the genres are all coming together into one style of writing that I and I alone use. That’s what I learned about writing in those years. No one can write like someone else, or they won’t be able to write at all. And even though my style is dark and miserable, I found out who I was as a writer on the way.

            And that is the obscenely long-winded answer to why I write. If I had to summarize it, I’d say I write because I always have. I write because I do, and because I didn’t.