Every storm has a name. Mine is Sweet.
You can call me Nayah. Most people do, eventually. But the ones who know me best, the ones who've stayed past midnight and seen the parts of me that don't make it into polite conversation — they know there's a storm somewhere under this calm, and that it's softer than it sounds.
I am eighteen years old, and I belong to Columbus, Ohio — a city of crossroads and cornfields, of rivers that don't know where they're going but flow anyway. I was raised on Midwestern kindness and summer thunderstorms, on front porches and the kind of quiet that makes you think too much. I think that's where the writing started. There's something about this place that makes you want to hold on to moments, to pin them down before they slip away.
I have been a writer since the fourth grade. That's the year I learned that a blank page wasn't empty at all — it was waiting. That's the year I figured out that a pencil could hold more magic than any wand, that a sentence could carry you further than any road, and that the people I invented on paper could never leave me the way real ones sometimes do.
So I wrote. And wrote. And never really stopped.
I write because the world is louder than I like, and my pages are soft places to hide. I write because every person I meet is a book I haven't finished reading yet — and because I'm still trying to figure out whether I'm the author of my own story, or just a character who's been narrating all along. Somewhere between the commas and the cliffhangers, between the half-finished drafts and the scenes I'll never show anyone, I am still learning which parts of me are real and which ones I simply wrote well enough to believe.
They say every storm carries a story. Mine just happens to be sweet — the kind that rains gently, the kind that clears the air and leaves everything greener. But don't mistake gentle for weak. Even a sweet storm has thunder. Even a quiet writer has chapters she hasn't let anyone read yet.
So. Pull up a chair. Stay a while. Turn the page.
The best parts are never on the first one. Besides, I'm very talkative and I can talk your ear off for hours.
I just.. I hate that this situation messed with not just her, but also me. I have been crying about her. I have looked my loved ones in the eyes and lied and said that I'm fine. I have said that I am okay when I'm not. I have told everyone that I'm doing fine. She is not dead but the part where she used to laugh at all my jokes is gone. Now, she's a beautiful flower growing in the wrong soil. Some flowers can grow together, while others need to be completely alone. I don't want to be the flower who is alone. She's always been a sweetheart, and I'm currently writing a poignant letter to her because I can't handle the thought of closing my eyes and going to sleep, because then I will want to see her and then I will remember that she does not know who I am anymore.