"The Power of Words in a Lonely Existence" by Jinxx Clark

A girl sits alone in the corner of an elementary school blacktop. Hair as dark as the night, short, and unruly. Looking down at a notebook that rested upon her criss-cross knees, hair fell into her face and casted shadows across her rounded cheeks. Even through those shadows her eyes still glowed as white-blue as the stars. Children danced around the blacktop and nearby playground, smiling, laughing, living. They danced around her, avoiding her except to stop and taunt or laugh in her face every once in awhile. She smiled at them sometimes, other times she was too far into her notebook to completely notice them. In her head, all the sounds of her surroundings were quieted, as if cotton had been stuck in her ears, and stories played out like a movie in front of her eyes. Each press of her pen to paper created a new tale, a new drawing, a new story.

Dragons, and fairies, knights, superheroes, leprechauns, and gremlins. Castles, oceans, lands, seas, mansions, and small villages. Magic, quests, missions, saving people, and battling for a new sense of freedom. All of it existed on the paper, and all of it existed in her head. It mattered not that she was sitting alone, because she wasn’t alone, not truly.

In a place where there are words, no one can be alone. In a place where you have the power to imagine, and create, and laugh in the face of danger, or smile at those that taunt you, you can never ever be alone.

A girl sits in a college lecture hall, listening with a smile as the professor reads out her newly published words. Her starry eyes gleam with joy as the people around her gasp and laugh along with the tale. Her hair falls into face as she attempt to hide her large smile and reddening cheeks. She can see it all in front of her, every single word making the tale come back to her mind as fresh as the day she first wrote it. She gets shoved back to reality as the people around her pat her on the back and the room explodes in claps. “You’re going to be the new Shakespeare or something!” someone calls out. She smiles at them.

The words had finally done their work, and it was with words that she would always feel at home. It was those words that had brought her to be somewhere where dreams could become realities.