She drags her graphite across the off-white sheet, creating a winding gray line across that textured surface. Perhaps this is a start of another successful piece, she hoped. If not, at least she'd created another channel for her creative emotional outburst for that night. Another line parallel to the last one. One etched after another for shade. And so the lines continued to fall upon the page. With them, all the words he uninhibitedly hurled at her that night fell away.

Now, she steals glances down at her iPod in hopes of choosing the perfect playlist for this long drive home. The Republic Tigers? Whitest Boy Alive? Some '90s love songs? Anything will do in order to drown out the sound of passing cars, distracting her from revisiting the past few hours. Not knowing her fault, she endured another night of his severe and uncivil manner. And so she accelerates, taking herself and her thoughts into the dark blue night on a winding gray road across that earthen surface.

So I am now a proud* owner of a 2-month-old Golden Retriever puppy named Tobias "Tobey" Cayton.

*The adjective "proud," as seen above, can be replaced with one of the following: excited, joyful, ecstatic, abso-fucking-lutely terrified of not being completely capable of taking care of another life, anxious, etc.

Is this what motherhood feels like? Because it is just downright frightening.

My eyes burn and my joints ache. My muscles scream with every twitch my tired brain directs. I am exhausted. And here is why.

I have foolish questions for all the fools alive out there. And I am a silly nineteen year-old to hope for answers. But without your answers, dear fools, I will end up being a silly eighty year-old still asking foolish questions, seeking solutions.

What I want to know is this: Is it possible to lose part of your soul? What does it feel like? And how can you find that missing part again?

I don't know if "missing" and "lost" are even the right words to use. Still, it's better to lose part of one's soul than to have it die. In both cases, however, you are incomplete. You are left empty. How could that possibly feel like? It seems like quite the tragic case, but to be left empty, you cannot exactly bring yourself to care. Yes, it seems like a wretched situation to be in.

Is this where I find myself now? I haven't looked at my sketchbooks in months; I haven't written anything of merit (if I ever have). I want to. Oh, how I want to. But it is just not there. It is not there to help me finger through pages of old sketchbooks, to run my eyes over the assorted colors of pencils and paints, to lift my pen and bring it closer to the page. I want to. I want to.

But I just do not care. Not enough. Not at all.

So please, dear fools, help me. I beg of you.

...

I've been hungry.

I like to reminisce.