There is girl from my town who still writes stories on this web-page. She was hurt by a teacher and so was my friend. She doesn't use any capital letters anymore. Her Instagram photos have a lot of negative space and panties in them. She dresses well in a tumblr way. She's just very tumblr in every way, though she isn't well in every way. I mean, she may be now: we haven't talked in a bit. But, she seemed like a person who was in the process of curating their life to be the subject of break up songs. I think she, at some level, wasn't displeased when lonely white men screamed flat at coffee houses for her, but it probably didn't make her happy. Which is not to say she deserved any of the bad stuff that happened. She didn't and the person who did the bad stuff, if anyone deserves to be put into a barn and burned alive, deserves to be put into a barn and burned alive.
It's a shame she gave up on capital letters though because she was actually a decent writer and could have probably been published if she wasn't always shirking convention. She runs a pizza shop now.
She has an apartment and a stable job and a disposable income which she uses to occasionally go to Maine and a series of relatively healthy relationships and is no longer being taken advantage of by people who should know better. People are really good at getting sad in my town, so a lot of people there felt sorry for her. Sadness doesn't do much.
In fact, and it's unfortunate that this realization is at the end because it means you'll have to read another story to really try it out, stories are about everything else besides being sad. Kurt Vonnegut said of writers: "We're just a group of unipolar depressives who have found a way to medicate." He's wrong and maybe a little old and a little misogynist because there are a lot of people who write.
She hasn't published but she's one of them. She's looking up now at the ceiling in the local library and thinking about how fluorescent lights look like stanchions and celotex means what celotex has always meant. She's doing fine, writing with her caps lock on and shift held down.
