The Ghosts Of Drafts Past

To My Writer Self,

I write to you from the edge of a comma, where ink bleeds into possibility and sentences tremble like unsteady bridges. A century yawns between us, a chasm, a cathedral, a carnival mirror. Do you still wear time as loosely as a moth-eaten sweater, or have you finally sewn its threads into something resembling sense?

Let me confess: I am a chaos of parentheses. A scribbler of half-born epics, a thief hoarding metaphors like contraband. They call this “craft,” but most days I’m just fumbling with a broken lantern, chasing shadows I’ve mistaken for ghosts. Are you still this way? Do you still mistake hunger for holiness, or have you learned to feast?

Ah, but the ‘silences’, those gorged, unspoken things. You remember Her, don’t you? The one who wore absence like perfume. Her laughter was a sonnet; her leaving, a semicolon that became a full stop. I carved elegies into napkins, love letters into fog, but my tongue turned traitor when it mattered. Words dissolved like sugar in rain. Tell me, old ghost: Did you ever forgive yourself for that? Or did you just bury the wound in a footnote and call it “character development”?

Life, they say, is a story. (Cliché, I know but clichés are just truths that forgot to blush.) Yours, I hope, is a riotous manuscript: coffee-stained, dog-eared, marbled with miracles and missteps. Did you let the plot twist? Dance with villains? Let the hero falter? Or did you cling to the lie of perfection, that gaudy cage? I beg you, tell me you chose mess over marble. Tell me you let the ink run wild.

Here’s the secret they don’t whisper to young writers: Doubt is your coauthor. It gnaws, yes, but it also ‘ignites’. That shadow dogging your steps? It’s just your silhouette, stretched by the rising sun. So write with your teeth. Write like a vandal defacing eternity. Write until your hands ache with the blasphemy of creation.

And the girl—no, the ‘woman’ who slipped through your fingers like smoke… Did you ever find her echo? Or did you finally see: Some stories aren’t meant to be held. They’re meant to bruise, to blur, to bloom into better verbs. Grief, after all, is just love’s uncorrected proof.

A hundred years. A hundred lives. Are you still a walking contradiction? A poem scrawled on a diner receipt? Good. Stay strange. Stay hungry. Let your contradictions be compasses. The world doesn’t need another polished stone; it needs your jagged, glittering shards.

They’ll call you “writer” like it’s a title. You’ll wear it like a borrowed coat. But remember: You are the question, not the answer. The wound, not the suture. The match struck in the dark, hissing ‘look, look, look’.

So burn, future fool. Burn brilliantly. Burn imperfectly. And when the silence comes as it will, don’t flinch. Fill it with fireworks.

Yours in reckless wonder,

The Ghost of Drafts Past

P.S. If you’ve somehow cured the habit of writing in bed, ‘unlearn it immediately’. Some vices are sacraments…