Monday, September 12, 6:03 AM

I need to take breaks. It still hurts to write. Physically, mentally, emotionally – it seems like every part of me is broken in one way or another. But I have to start doing this again. Two weeks in the hospital without a journal left me starving for words.

I have kept a lot of journals, but this one is especially important for two reasons. Reason number one: I'm not writing this for myself. I'm putting these words down for someone else to find, which is something I never do. Reason number two: I have a strong feeling this will be the last journal I ever write.

My name, in case someone finds this and cares to know who wrote it, is Ryan. I'm almost old enough to drive. (Although this would require access to a car, which I lack). I'm told that I'm tall for my age but need to gain weight or there's no hope of making the varsity cut next year. I have a great hope that I will remain thin.

I can imagine what this morning would have been like before the accident. I would be getting ready for the hour-long bus ride to school. I would have so much to say to Sarah. An hour next to her was always time well spent. We had so much in common, which kept us from going completely crazy in a town populated by just under seven hundred people.

I'm really going to miss those hour long conversations with Sarah. I wonder if I'll get lonely. The truth is I don't even know if I'm allowed to mention her name. But I can't stop. I am a writer. This is what I do. My teachers, parents, even Sarah – they all say I write too much, that I'm obsessive about it. But then, in the same breath, they can't help but mention that I'm gifted. Like when Mrs. Garvey told me I understand words and their usage in the same way a prodigy on the piano understands notes and sounds. But I have a much simpler answer, and I'm pretty sure I'm more right than my teacher is: I have written a lot, every day, every year, for many years in a row.

Practice makes perfect.

I think my favorite writers are those who admitted while they were still alive that they couldn't live without writing. John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway, Robert Frost – guys who put writing up there in the same category as air and water. Write or die trying. That kind of thinking agrees with me.

Because here I am. Write or die trying.

If I turn back the pages in all the journals I've written I basically find two things: scary stories of my own creation and the recording of strange occurrences in Skeleton Creek. I can't say for certain why this is so, other than to fall back on the old adage that a writer writes what he knows, and I have known fear all my life.

I don't think I'm a coward – I wouldn't be in the position I'm in now if I was a coward – but I am the sort of person who overanalyzes, worries, frets. When I hear a noise scratching under the bed - either real or imagined - I stare at the ceiling for hours and wonder what it might be that's trying to claw its way out (I picture it with fangs, long boney fingers, and bulging red eyes). For a person who worries like I do and has a vivid imagination to match, Skeleton Creek is the wrong sort of place to endure childhood.

I know my writing has changed in the past year. The two kinds of writing – the made up scary stories and the documenting of events in Skeleton Creek — have slowly become one. I don't have to make stories up any longer, because I'm more certain than ever that the very town I live in is haunted.

This is the truth.

And the truth, I've learned, can kill you.

I'm tired now. So tired.

I have to put this down.

Even if I can't stop thinking about it.