The Cursor Blinks

The cursor blinks. 2:47 AM. Mikayla's hands hover over the keyboard, not quite touching, as if the keys might burn her. Or save her. She isn't sure which.

The writing community's weekly prompt glows on her second monitor: Write a story about a character who is haunted by something or someone. She's read Clive Barker since she was fifteen—she knows haunting. She knows how desire and dread weave together until you can't tell which thread is which. But knowing and doing are different animals, and right now, sitting in her apartment with the radiator ticking and the street below silent, the distance between them feels infinite.

She's been writing for years. Notebooks full of stories. Hard drives cluttered with drafts. But she's never shared anything. Not really. Not with strangers who might actually read it, might actually judge it, might actually see her.

Her fingers drop to the keys.

She writes about a woman haunted by the smell of her grandmother's perfume. Safe. Nostalgic. She structures it like a prose poem, all careful line breaks and measured grief. Nothing too raw. Nothing that bleeds. By 4 AM, she has twelve-hundred words that don't embarrass her, and that feels like a miracle.

She reads it three times. Considers deleting it. Reads it again. Then, before she can stop herself, before the fear can calcify into paralysis, she hits submit.

She closes the laptop and crawls into bed as the sky begins to gray.

The morning comes with its usual weight. Mikayla wakes at 10 AM feeling like she's been buried alive. The sun through the curtains is an accusation. She knows she needs to get up—shower, eat, pretend to be a functional human—but her body is a sandbag, her mind a fog bank. This is the tax for the 3 AM high, the payment for those hours when her brain felt electric and possible.

She reaches for her phone. Three notifications from the writing community.

Her heart does something complicated.

The first comment is from someone named DarkRose87: Beautiful imagery. The perfume detail absolutely gutted me.

The second is from WritingByMoonlight: This is so delicate and haunting. More, please.

The third is just an emoji—a purple heart—but it's from someone called BarkerFan, and that username alone makes her throat tight.

She reads them again. And again. And for the first time in three days, she feels something other than the gray crush of worthlessness. She feels seen. She feels like maybe, just maybe, she isn't wasting her life.

She gets out of bed.

The second week, she writes about a girl who finds her mother's suicide note twenty years after the fact, tucked inside a copy of The Turn of the Screw. It's closer to the bone. It's based on something that almost happened, a parallel-universe version of her own life where her mother made a different choice. She writes it in a single sitting, 11 PM to 4 AM, her hands shaking by the end, tears on her keyboard. She doesn't know if it's good. She only knows it's true, in that sidelong way fiction can be true.

She posts it. Goes to bed. Wakes up to seventeen comments.

DarkRose87: I'm speechless. This is devastating and perfect.

WritingByMoonlight: You have a gift. Seriously. Don't stop.

BarkerFan: Clive would be proud. This is the kind of story that lives in your chest afterward.

There are others. Strangers pouring kindness into her inbox, telling her they felt it, they got it, they want more. She sits at her kitchen table with cold coffee and reads every word three times, and she feels something dangerous blooming in her chest: hope. Ambition. The belief that maybe she can actually do this. Maybe she can be the writer she's always dreamed of being.

She's still riding that high when her phone rings on Thursday.

Her brother's voice is careful, too careful. "Mikayla, it's Dad. He had a stroke."

The world tilts. She hears the rest through water—he's in the ICU, he's stable, they don't know how bad it is yet, they'll know more in a few days”. Her brother is flying out. Her sister is driving up. Can Mikayla come?

She looks at her bank account. $147. Rent is due in a week. The flight is $500, minimum.

"I'll see what I can do," she says, and hates herself for the lie.

The days fracture.

Monday she wakes up and can't remember if she slept. Tuesday disappears entirely. Wednesday she writes for six hours straight, a story that starts at the end and works backward, a man unraveling his own life in reverse, and it's chaotic, structurally insane, probably unreadable, but she can't stop. She's crying while she writes. She doesn't know why. Or she knows exactly why. 4 AM. Submit. Bed. Morning.

Morning. The weight. The gray. Her father is dying and she's writing stories and she doesn't know which matters more and that thought alone makes her want to disappear. She checks her phone. Four comments on the reverse story.

DarkRose87 says it's ambitious but hard to follow. WritingByMoonlight says she's worried. BarkerFan says: This feels like you're in pain. I hope you're okay.

She's not okay. She doesn't know how to be okay. Her father is 800 miles away and she can't afford to see him and every time she closes her eyes she sees him alone in a hospital bed and she can't breathe can't think can't—

She opens her laptop. 2 AM. She writes.

The next week is better. She writes a witch story, a woman who burns her own house down and rises from the ashes with a garden growing in her palms. It's about redemption. It's about survival. It's about everything she needs to believe is possible. She writes it in three nights, careful and deliberate, and when she posts it, she feels like maybe she's climbing out of the hole.

DarkRose87: Yes. This is the Mikayla I was hoping to see again.

WritingByMoonlight: Gorgeous. You're back.

BarkerFan: The garden metaphor is everything.

And then Friday. Her brother calls.

"Dad's giving up." His voice cracks. "He's talking about hospice. He doesn't want to fight anymore."

Spiral.

That's the only word for it.

She doesn't sleep.

Or she sleeps for sixteen hours.

Time is meaningless.

Her apartment is a disaster.

Dishes in the sink growing architecture.

She writes at 3 AM. She writes at 10 AM.

She writes a story about a woman who is so broken she can't remember her own name.

The woman wanders through a city that keeps changing shape.

The buildings lean. The streets fold.

Nothing makes sense because nothing makes sense.

She posts it. Doesn't read it first. Can't.

She checks the comments the next day. Five. Only five.

DarkRose87: I'm not sure what you're going for here, but I hope you're taking care of yourself.

WritingByMoonlight: Mikayla, please message me if you need to talk.

BarkerFan: This feels like you're disappearing. Please don't disappear.

Two other people leave brief, polite comments that feel like pity.

She closes the laptop. She doesn't cry. She's past crying.

But she keeps writing.

Because here's the thing they don't tell you about mania, about depression, about the rollercoaster of bipolar 2: sometimes the only thing that keeps you tethered to the world is the thing you can't stop doing. Even when it's 3 AM and you're exhausted and your father is dying and you didn't get to say goodbye and your family is rallying around him while you're stuck here, broke and useless—even then, the story matters. The words matter. The act of creation, of making something from nothing, of pouring your broken self onto the page and hoping someone, anyone, will understand—it matters.

She writes every night. The stories get stranger. Tighter. More desperate. A man who eats his own memories. A child who drowns in a bathtub that's actually an ocean. A woman who realizes she's been dead for years. She doesn't know if they're good. She doesn't care. She just writes.

DarkRose87 comments on every one.

WritingByMoonlight comments on every one.

BarkerFan comments on every one.

They don't always love the stories. But they show up. They read. They tell her they're there.

The call comes on a Tuesday. Her sister.

"He changed his mind." Her voice is thick with exhausted relief. "We all flew out. We talked to him. He's going to keep fighting."

Mikayla sits on her kitchen floor with the phone pressed to her ear. "That's... that's amazing."

"We told him about everyone who wanted him to stay. About you. I showed him your messages."

Mikayla's messages. The ones she sent because she couldn't be there. The ones that felt like confessions shouted into a void.

"He wants to talk to you when he's stronger," her sister says.

"Okay," Mikayla whispers.

She hangs up. She should feel relief. She should feel joy. Her father is going to live. Her family saved him.

But she wasn't there. She didn't save him. They did.

And she doesn't know if that makes her grateful or gutted, so she feels both, high and low crashing together, and she sits on her kitchen floor until the sun goes down and the dark comes back.

3 AM. She's at her desk. She's always at her desk now.

The prompt from two weeks ago is still pinned: Make a character's addiction or obsession an important element of your story.

She starts typing.

This time, she writes about a writer. A woman who can't stop writing even when the world is falling apart. Who writes through grief and exhaustion and the kind of pain that should stop you cold. Who finds that the act of creation is the only thing that makes sense, the only thing that feels like survival. Who doesn't know if she's writing to save herself or because she's too broken to stop.

She writes until dawn. She reads it once. She posts it.

The comments come fast.

DarkRose87: This is it. This is the one. I felt every word.

WritingByMoonlight: You're not broken. You're a writer. This is what we do.

BarkerFan: This is the most honest thing I've read in years. Thank you for sharing it. Thank you for staying.

Mikayla reads them through blurred vision. She doesn't know if she's crying from exhaustion or gratitude or something else entirely. She doesn't know if the writing saved her or if she saved herself by writing. She doesn't know if there's a difference.

What she knows is this: her father is alive. She is alive. And she has written seven stories in seven weeks, each one a fragment of her shattered self, each one a message in a bottle thrown into the digital void.

And three strangers caught them. Three strangers said: I see you. Keep going.

The morning comes. The weight is still there—it's always there—but today, it's a little lighter.

Mikayla makes coffee. She opens her laptop. She looks at the new prompt: Write a story about hope in unexpected places.

She smiles. Not a big smile. Just the edge of one.

She starts typing.

Outside, the sun rises over the city, and somewhere, in another time zone, her father is waking up too. They're both still here. Still fighting. Still breathing.

The cursor blinks.

She writes.