I am writing because it’s 12:12 AM and I have to get up for school in six hours, yet there’s nothing I’d rather be doing. Why sleep when there’s so much that can be said, so much to share with everyone, anyone who listens?

It is in these hours that my fingers soar across the page in fast-forward, dragging ink across the side of my hand in my frenzied rush, scrambling to get all my thoughts onto the page before they evaporate into the emptiness of these small, murky hours. Nobody else stirs; I am free to do whatever I want and raise all hell; nobody would know. Yet I choose to write.

Of course I am tired, and I’ll definitely regret this at 6:00 tomorrow morning. Whatever I’m writing probably won’t even make sense.

But I write on, because somehow it feels like what I’m supposed to do. It’s odd, I think, that this will serve as a time capsule one day; I will look this over and think, how crazy that I was actually a real junior in high school once… how little I knew… how much hadn’t happened yet.

Maybe I write in spite of all that. Here I am, baring myself exactly as I am: raw, exhausted, naive, full of life. I will not be like this forever, no matter how long the numbers 12:26 seem to linger on my clock—but this piece, this sliver of who I am right now—this will never fade.

I am writing because I don’t yet know what’s going to happen tomorrow or any day after that, and that’s a spectacular thing: this moment, forever captured on this little piece of paper. It is enough for me to be right here, right now, even if there’s nothing else special about it other than the pure fact that it is ours for just this glimmering instant. There is something to be said for that simplicity: today was a normal day, and I lived my normal life, and hallelujah to that. I am writing that right here, right now, because I can.

Maybe that’s all I need: because I can. And someone might see this some time from now, and they’ll think, she wrote this before the world changed. Maybe so. I have no idea if the world is about to change or if maybe just my world is. I don’t even know what’s coming twenty heartbeats from now; I only know that it’s 12:49 AM and there’s school tomorrow and I am happy because I am writing.

There’s a dull murmur rising from the street outside and seeping through my window, and there’s a chill even under my duvet. The only light I have to write by is a dim one over my head; still I write because carpe diem. This is not my best work, granted, but it’s still my very own voice in which I read it, and there is something marvelous in that.

I write to put a piece of myself into every word, every sentence, holding my quirks and concerns and amusements and trivialities. Here I am, lounging in bed in the darkness that envelopes 12:56 and everything within it, and in the background Jamie Cullum is drawling, “in the wee, small hours of the morning/while the whole wide world is fast asleep…” with the saxophone dripping its melancholy melody all over his words, and here I am, still writing, and you’re still reading, and it could be just the four of us, all alone in the world right now, and maybe that wouldn’t be such a bad thing. 

When I write, it’s my voice, and nobody can take that from me, because maybe I am ordinary and insecure and selfish, and maybe it aches to know that I won’t live forever, but at least I have my voice. My voice is unlike anybody else’s because it is my own, and I can do with it what I choose. This is my voice; it belongs to no one else, no matter who tries to steal it or beat me or break me or shut me down and drag me out kicking and screaming. Nobody can ever take this voice away from me, and that is why I write, even at 1:09 AM this Friday morning.