I stare at the blank page and see my own face reflected in the white void.
Not metaphorically. Literally. The computer screen has become a mirror, and all I can write about now is me. The most boring, unremarkable, ordinary human who ever lived. The person no one would choose to read about if they had literally any other option.
Who wants to read about someone who works in a cubicle? Who eats instant ramen for dinner because real food costs too much? Who hasn't had a conversation with another human being about anything meaningful in three months? Who cries over fictional characters like they were real children?
What's the story there? "Local Nobody Continues Being Nobody, More Nothingness at Eleven."
But it's all I have left. My imagination used to create worlds, and now it can only inventory the contents of my empty apartment. My creativity once birthed heroes, and now it can only document the slow death of the person who created them.
I'm not even tragic in an interesting way. I'm not dying of consumption in a garret, writing beautiful poetry with my last breath. I'm not fighting against impossible odds to save the world. I'm not overcoming trauma or addiction or poverty with inspiring determination.
I'm just... sad. Quietly, unremarkably, ordinarily sad.
The kind of sad that makes people uncomfortable because it has no clear cause they can fix and no obvious solution they can suggest. The kind of sad that makes people change the subject because there's nothing epic or redemptive about it.
I wake up at 6:30 AM to an alarm that sounds like dying robots. I shower with generic soap in a bathroom with a mirror that shows me the same unremarkable face every day - brown hair that never does anything interesting, brown eyes that hold no mystery, skin that's neither beautiful nor horrible, just there.
I eat toast because cereal costs too much. White bread because wheat bread costs too much. No butter because butter costs too much.
I take the bus to work because I can't afford a car. I sit in the same seat if possible because routine is the only comfort left when everything else has been stripped away. I listen to other people's conversations about their kids, their vacations, their problems that have solutions.
I arrive at my beige cubicle in my beige building and write beige words about beige products for beige people living beige lives. Eight hours of designing marketing materials for a company that sells... something. I've been there two months and I still don't fully understand what we sell because it doesn't matter. Nothing I write matters. Nothing I create has weight or meaning or the power to change anyone's life.
At lunch, I eat a sandwich from the vending machine and read news articles about successful people doing successful things in successful places I'll never visit. Writers winning awards for books I'll never afford to buy. Movies being made from stories I'll never see. A world moving forward while I sit still in my beige box eating beige food and feeling beige feelings.
I go home to an apartment that's smaller than some people's closets. One room with a bed, a desk, and a window that looks out at the brick wall of the building next door. No view. No light. No reason for anyone to ever want to visit, even if I had anyone to invite.
I heat up ramen because it's cheap and filling and tastes like giving up. I eat it while watching TV shows about people whose problems get resolved in thirty minutes or whose adventures span galaxies. People who matter. People whose stories deserve to be told.
Not like me.
What's interesting about someone who's never been anywhere, never done anything, never been anyone worth knowing? What's compelling about a person whose greatest achievement was creating something beautiful that got stolen and corrupted?
Even my tragedy is boring. It's not a dramatic betrayal by a close friend. It's not a sudden, shocking loss. It's just... bureaucratic theft. Legal paperwork. Corporate machinery grinding up one insignificant person while the world shrugs and moves on.
No one's going to make a movie about the nobody who got screwed by a publishing contract. No one's going to write songs about the dreamer who learned that dreams don't pay rent. No one's going to remember the ordinary person who loved fictional characters more than real people because the fictional ones were kinder, braver, and more interesting than anyone they'd ever meet in real life.
I try to write about myself and every sentence reads like an obituary for someone who was never fully alive.
"Local nobody worked in a cubicle until they died. They had no friends, no family who understood them, no accomplishments worth mentioning. They once wrote a story that someone else made famous. They spent their last years eating ramen and mourning characters who were never real. They were survived by no one who will miss them."
Even my pain is boring. It's not the grand suffering of heroes facing impossible odds. It's not the noble anguish of someone fighting injustice or overcoming addiction or surviving trauma. It's just... the quiet ache of someone who wanted to matter and learned they don't.
I sit in my apartment at night, looking at the blank page, and realize I don't even know how to write myself as a character because I've never been one. I've been background scenery in other people's stories. The extra in the coffee shop. The figure walking past the window. The face in the crowd that no one looks at twice.
How do you turn scenery into a protagonist? How do you make furniture interesting? How do you build a story around someone whose entire existence could be summarized as "they were there until they weren't"?
Maybe that's why I can only write about myself now. Not because it's the only story left to tell, but because it's the only story no one else would want to steal. Who would plagiarize the diary of a nobody? Who would adapt the memoir of someone who never did anything worth remembering?
It's theft-proof by virtue of being worthless.
But maybe... maybe that's not entirely true.
Maybe there are other people like me. Other nobodies sitting in other beige apartments, eating other instant meals, mourning other losses that the world considers too small to matter. Other ordinary people whose extraordinary inner lives are invisible to everyone around them.
Maybe the reason I can only write about myself now is because I'm finally brave enough to admit that ordinary people have stories too. That quiet pain is still real pain. That unremarkable lives can still break your heart if you look closely enough.
Maybe someone out there needs to read about the nobody who loved fictional characters more than real people. Maybe someone else is eating ramen and crying over stories that mattered to them and feeling like they're the only person sad enough, boring enough, ordinary enough to care about such things.
Maybe being ordinary isn't the same as being worthless.
Maybe being unremarkable doesn't mean being unworthy of being remembered.
Maybe.
But probably not.
Because who would read a story about someone like me? Who wants to spend their precious time following the adventures of someone who never has any? Who wants to invest emotionally in someone whose biggest struggle is deciding between instant ramen and mac and cheese for dinner?
No one.
Which means this story - my story, the only story I have left - will die with me in this small apartment, unread and unmourned, like everything else I've ever created.
The difference is, this time, I already know no one cares.
This time, I'm not hoping for anything different.
This time, I'm writing for an audience of zero and somehow that feels more honest than all the beautiful lies I used to tell myself about mattering.
The cursor blinks on the blank page.
I type: "Chapter 1: Nobody."
And for the first time in months, the words don't feel like lies.
They feel like the truth.
Boring, ordinary, unremarkable truth.
But truth nonetheless.
[Even if no one will ever read it.]
[Even if it doesn't matter.]
[Even if I don't matter.]
[Truth is still truth.]
[And maybe that's enough.]
[It has to be.]