Unscripted

I have always lived in pages, walked in between words and stopped over punctuations.
Slept in the curve of a comma.
Breathed in the smell of fresh paper, or maybe old worn out pages.
Bled ink straight from my asterisk heart.
I have always lived in a story.
And for the most part, it was not a very exciting one.
For the first few chapters it was almost insignificant.
The words didn't matter to me and I didn't know there was a story worth writing.
I was just there, existing.
Unaware of anything and following the script that seemed to be written for me.
And then the ink turned blue.
The pages were wet, the ink smudging as my fuzzy brain tried to understand what was going on.
Words and emotions were fusing into a jumbled mess. One I couldn't comprehend.
I'd lost count of how many pages flipped.
But they finally found some shade and warmth.
The ink dried.
This next chapter felt like I was writing it.
Like I could change the ink and the pages to whatever I wanted.
Like I was writing all along, only I didn't know.
So what could I possibly write now that could make it better?
What could I possibly write that'd make me happy?
It's impossible to write down lies when you're an open book.
I didn't want to write my story, what was the mystery in that?
I could write my version of perfection and I'd still find an alternate ending that sounded better.
So I stopped.
Felt the comma-shaped bed disappear from underneath me.
I was suspended, falling.
I crashed hard, the ground wasn't as soft as the pages.
I still curled into a comma to sleep.
Took a while to get used to the sounds and smells.
The feelings you could feel if you weren't one dimensional.
The world wasn't just in the colours I'd seen.
There were shades I could've never written in, stories I never would've imagined.
I don't have to be just one story.
I can't be just one story.
So I'm going to live all of them, every possible version.
When it gets hard to breathe I'll stop and catch my breath, conjure up a semicolon in my head. 
And I'll live, all the way to the fullstop.

                                                --Ananya Murali