“Let me tell you a secret: writers are selfish.

It’s true. We are a self-absorbed, parsimonious, mercenary bunch. And we love flaunting words that the non-writers don’t (our world is neatly divided; we who write and those who don’t). We are brigands who will steal words and phrases and mean to make them our own forever. We are not smart nor clever. We hide under the covers, waiting for the moments between twilight and dawn, and then emerge bright-eyed, glinting with a touch of madness and heartache and genius, all armed with the tools of our trade: keyboards, or felt tip pens, the journal we paid too much for (but they were so pretty), or sharpened pencils covered with that comforting, fresh-shaven smell of wood.

And we all have a box where we keep the things we have stolen, lost things we have picked up in our drifting thoughts and daydreams, and each night, alone, in a swirl of words, we take those things out, one by one. Things petty or powerful, they are all there in that box. Like the smile of a girl you love, or the look in his eyes as he stares out the window, or the sad lines on a stranger’s face. Mist rising up and above a canopy of trees: ascending from the quiet spaces in between the aged, patient trunks of a forest lining the side of a mountain in far Virginia.

Perhaps, more than anything, we write with this little box wide open, our little treasures strewn across the floor like a heart full of sorrow. Full of tears and stifled sobs behind closed doors. That’s why I’m terror-stricken every time I write. Every time I open my box, I’m afraid that all of it will come rushing out like Pandora’s ghosts, escaping and dissipating, whisked away by the wind to disappear with the crack of dawn. Free.

Gone.

So I watch people. All you sad, smiling, happy, unhappy, delighted, anguished people. Walking around with empty bubbles and adjectives floating around you. So full of stories, so filled with sensation, every single one of you made up of little miracles stitched together by time and not knowing it at all. And I listen, fascinated, like how I watch, now, the way the light from the amber-washed morning sun slips between the gap of two adjacent buildings. I want to burn that sight into my mind. I want to write about it. I want to write about you. Because to remain silent, to allow the words to erase themselves from my fingertips, would kill me. It would wipe me out.

All of you, beautiful, not in the way your features are arranged on your face, not in the way your voice sounds when you sing, but only in the way you simply are. Don’t you see? Don’t you know? You are not your failures, your little disappointments, nor your moments of doubt and hesitation; you are beautiful, just by being. Always.

We writers are bandits. We are thieves. And I steal away all these moments in which I watch and listen and stand awed by you, so I can write it all out, in long lines and with pages full of words, just so you can see all that I see in you.”

- ‘3: We Thieves’, from Thirteen 2 Thirteen