I wrote a book about you.

"Are you going to write about me?" He asked. We stared up through the wavering pines to the sequin sky. The tender spring grass sank into the damp earth under our shoes. His eyes twinkled mischievously. He was a strange creature, one I was quickly trying to understand as there was not much time left. I hardly knew him, and in a few days, I would leave for Colorado. This evening marked the end of our brief time in the same galaxy. We would know each other for less than one full revolution around the sun before I would pack my bags and turn to face the west for seven months.

"Maybe," I said teasingly. "Are you scared?"

"No," he laughed, nudging a tall dandelion with his foot and watching it spring back up resiliently. "Well, yes. A little. What's it all look like from inside this mind?" He tapped my temple with his calloused finger. "I wish I could know what I'm like."

The conversation rings familiar.

"Am I in it?" someone would say, and point with a wagging finger. Point to what?

To my manuscript.

MY BOOK. That strange little novel that came to be for no reason other than a strange urge inside me to get. it. out. (More to come on this later. Maybe.)

I was shaken from my writing reverie by the words "am I in it?" constantly. It came from people I sat next to in class who saw me clacking away at my keyboard (obviously I was not practicing accounting with such distinct focus and passion). Friends I hadn't really been friends with for years, if ever. Old boyfriends, squirming anxiously and wondering if I revealed anything unsavory, sending messages because they too had seen the stirring of the beast. Family members peered over my shoulder, anxious to catch something, anything, of themselves in my pages. They all wanted to know.

Am I in it?

I hadn't pondered this much until lately. But I have pondered it. And my thoughts are as follows:

I have a very dangerous weapon beneath my fingers at this very second. 

I think of those boyfriends squirming, those friends dying of curiosity. Why do they care?

They care because of a few reasons. One, people are quite self-centered as I'm sure you've noticed. Two, people care what other people think. Three, nobody wants to be outed.

No boyfriend wants to open a book about themselves to read "he was handsome enough, but a terrible kisser." No mother wants to turn the page and see her shortcomings in weeping black ink. No friend wants to finish a chapter in which they were a villain, or perhaps worse - in which they didn't exist at all.

And so, as I begin my next book (well, I think I've begun it?) I keep in mind the fact that by writing, I am, in a way, interacting with my world (past present and future). It isn't so much about control, as, well... let's be real. It's about control. It's a little bit about revenge, a little bit about cathartic release, a little bit about expressing the immense amounts of love and awe I hold for people, and a little bit about finally, for once in my life, getting things my own way.

So, should you be scared?

Probably. I spend my day collecting lovers, monsters, sidekicks, mentors, and muses all to throw into blank pages.

No one is safe.