Perhaps therein lies the problem.

어쩌다 여기까지 왔을까?

어쩌겠어… 이미 와버렸는데.

I'm a writer, so I'm very creative.

Perhaps therein lies the problem.

I didn't sit down to write this as some tragic confession. I started because I needed to understand—myself, what happened, why the constellations aren't where they should be anymore. The fluorescent lights in my apartment flicker like dying stars, and I can't tell if it's the building's faulty wiring or another crack spreading through reality.

I used to believe the world could be saved if we just changed the heart of man. More than anything, I wanted that to be true.

It started the way most quiet catastrophes do—with someone I barely noticed becoming someone I couldn't stop seeing.

---

The overnight shift at Edison's Market was a cathedral of fluorescent light and humming freezers. I stocked shelves, rang up desperate 2 AM purchases, swept the fragments of people's small disasters from linoleum that had seen better decades. The kind of place where time moves differently, where the boundary between night and day blurs into something liminal.

You know the type.

Mark was one of the regulars. Late thirties, wearing the same faded hoodie like armor against the world's judgment. He bought the same things every night: one red apple, one scratch-off ticket. Never spoke beyond necessary pleasantries, never made eye contact for more than a heartbeat.

But in my notebook—the one I kept behind the register, filled with fragments and character sketches—Mark had a story. A daughter named Joy he hadn't seen in three years. A mother whose medication he couldn't afford. A guitar gathering dust in a closet because dreaming felt too dangerous now.

I wrote about Joy with careful detail: gap-toothed grin, hair in uneven pigtails, the way she'd count change with intense concentration. I gave her Sunday afternoon visits and a favorite stuffed elephant named Mr. Peanuts. I wrote her real because Mark needed her to be real, even if only in the margins of my imagination.

Then one Tuesday night, he walked in holding her hand.

"This is Joy," he said, his voice carrying a warmth I'd never heard before. "She's staying with me for the weekend."

She looked exactly as I'd written her. Down to the way she peered at the candy display with wide, calculating eyes, trying to maximize her dollar fifty allowance.

The receipt paper trembled in my hands as I rang up his apple.

---

I tested it carefully. Scientists learn not to trust their initial observations, to account for variables and coincidences. So I wrote small things first:

"The coffee machine floods the break room tomorrow morning."

It did.

"Mrs. Chen finds the ring she lost last month."

She came in the next evening, tears streaming, showing off the simple gold band she'd discovered in her winter coat pocket.

"Harper gets the promotion she's been wanting."

My best friend called me at 6 AM, breathless with excitement about her new position at the design firm downtown.

Each success felt like stepping closer to the edge of a cliff I couldn't see the bottom of. But the power was intoxicating. For the first time in my twenty-six years, I could fix things. I could reach into the world's broken machinery and adjust the gears.

I started with myself, naturally. Small improvements: a better apartment in a building where the heat actually worked. A submission acceptance from a literary magazine I'd never heard of. An agent named Lena Callahan who discovered my blog and sent breathless emails about my "extraordinary voice."

When Lena's email arrived in my inbox—subject line: "Your words stopped my heart"—I cried in the employee bathroom until my shift supervisor knocked to ask if I was alright.

Except Lena wasn't real, was she? I'd written her into existence with careful specificity: sharp wit, tragic backstory, an eye for beautiful prose. I'd manufactured her faith, scripted her enthusiasm, puppeted her belief in my work.

The realization should have stopped me. Instead, it made me more careful about the details.

---

The first tear appeared on a Wednesday.

A child wandered into the store around 3 AM, blue sneakers squeaking against the floor, looking around with the dazed confusion of someone caught between sleeping and waking.

"Where's my mom?" he asked, his voice thin as paper.

I recognized him immediately. He was from a story I'd started but never finished—a brief sketch about a baker's son, written in the margins when business was slow. But I'd never given him a mother. Just blue sneakers and a single line of dialogue.

Just existence without context.

He vanished somewhere between the cereal aisle and the checkout counter, dissolving like salt in water. The only evidence he'd ever been there was the faint squeak-squeak-squeak that seemed to echo long after the sound had stopped.

That was the first crack in the world's foundation. But not the last.

---

Stories have gravity. Once written, they exert a pull on reality, warping the space around them like massive objects bending light. And every story wants to be complete, wants to resolve its contradictions, wants to make sense.

But I was careless with my endings. I left plot threads dangling, characters half-formed, conflicts unresolved. The universe tried to compensate, stretching itself thin to accommodate my oversights.

Mark's wife began existing on Tuesdays and Thursdays but not on weekends. A customer I'd written as a widower would sometimes arrive with a woman who flickered in and out of visibility, present and absent in the same breath. Children appeared in the toy aisle with no parents, no origin, no purpose beyond existing in the spaces I'd left blank.

Reality became a broken story, full of continuity errors and plot holes that gaped like wounds.

I tried to fix it. God, how I tried. I spent sleepless nights rewriting, patching holes, smoothing contradictions. But every correction created new problems, new inconsistencies that demanded their own resolutions. It was like trying to repair a spiderweb with mittens on—each attempt to mend one broken strand only tore apart three others.

The worst part was Mark. Sweet, quiet Mark with his apple and his scratch-off ticket and his daughter who existed only when I remembered to write her into the world.

"Have you seen Joy?" he asked one night, his voice hollow. "I keep thinking she was here, but I can't... I can't remember if she was ever real."

I watched him leave that night, shoulders bent under the weight of missing someone who'd never existed outside my imagination. I'd given him love and then ripped it away, left him with phantom memories and the ache of loss for something that was never his to lose.

That's when I understood: I wasn't God. I was barely even human. I was just a girl with a notebook and the terrible ability to make the world believe my lies.

---

The tears spread faster after that. Holes in reality that leaked into each other, places where the story broke down entirely. I found myself slipping between them—standing in my apartment one moment, then suddenly in a space that existed between seconds, watching planets blink out of existence like candles being snuffed.

Each tear led back to something I'd written. A poorly constructed character. An unfinished scene. A contradiction that reality couldn't resolve. And somewhere in the darkness between broken moments, I began to understand the scope of what I'd done.

I hadn't just affected my town, my store, my small corner of existence. Stories ripple outward like stones thrown into still water, and the universe is vast enough to accommodate infinite narratives. Entire star systems had restructured themselves around my casual metaphors. Civilizations had risen and fallen to support throwaway lines I'd scribbled during slow Tuesday shifts.

I carry a messenger bag now, filled with notebooks and pens that work in environments where physics becomes optional. I move through tears in the fabric of space-time, trying to patch what I can, rewriting carefully. Each correction feels like surgery performed with a crayon on a patient made of spider silk.

Some tears I can mend. Others are too damaged, reality too fractured to support any narrative structure. Those I have to abandon, watching entire pocket universes collapse like houses of cards in a hurricane.

---

I'm sitting in one now—a space that exists outside of time, where the stars pulse like heartbeats and gravity flows in the wrong direction. The air tastes of unfinished sentences and abandoned dreams. In the distance, I can see Earth through a crack in the void, small and blue and perfect, spinning in its stable orbit like nothing has changed.

But I know better. I can see the fault lines spreading across its surface, the places where my stories have stressed reality beyond its breaking point. Soon, those cracks will reach the core, and then...

I flip to a blank page in my notebook. The pen trembles in my hand like a tuning fork struck against silence.

How did I end up here?

What can I do when I'm already here?

I want to write an ending that makes sense. That gathers all the loose threads and weaves them into something beautiful, something that redeems the chaos I've created. But I'm terrified that any ending I write will just make things worse.

Maybe that's the real problem. Not that I'm creative, not that I can alter reality through fiction. The problem is that I'm human, and humans are fundamentally flawed storytellers. We leave things unfinished. We contradict ourselves. We create meaning through accident and call it intention.

We write ourselves into corners and then wonder why the world doesn't make sense anymore.

But I have to try. Because somewhere out there, Mark is still looking for his daughter. Joy is still waiting to exist completely. And reality is still holding its breath, waiting for someone to write an ending that doesn't destroy everything.

I place the pen against paper. The void holds its breath.

I'm a writer, so I'm very creative.

Perhaps therein lies the problem—