You Are All That Matters -

For weeks, he’d wrestled with the words, crossing them out, tearing pages in half, and starting over. He wanted to capture something profound, something that would resonate with the world. But every time he read what he’d written, it felt hollow, like a ghost of the truth he was trying to tell.

Elias sighed, rubbing his tired eyes. "I’m trying to write something that matters, Clara. But it’s all just... garbage. No one will ever want to read this." You Are All That Matters

"Of course it is," Clara said with a small smile. "It's a first draft. It’s the skeleton, the bare bones. All that matters right now is that you’re getting it down, getting it out of your head. You can't fix a blank page, Elias. You can only fix what’s already there." For weeks, he’d wrestled with the words, crossing

He thought about the advice he’d read once: “The first draft is just you telling yourself the story” . It wasn't meant to be perfect; it was meant to exist. Yet, the weight of his own expectations felt like a physical burden. He kept comparing his messy, incomplete thoughts to the polished masterpieces on his bookshelf. Elias sighed, rubbing his tired eyes

He looked at the papers again. "I want it to. But look at it. It's full of holes. The characters are flat. The dialogue is stiff."

The coffee in the chipped mug had gone cold, a stagnant dark pool mirroring the dull grey of the morning sky outside. Elias sat at the small kitchen table, his fingers hovering over the keys of an old typewriter he’d found in a thrift store years ago. Beside him lay a scattered pile of papers—the first draft of a story he had been trying to write for what felt like a lifetime.

He looked at the title he’d scrawled at the top of the first page: “All That Matters.”