Pain

The feeling never fades away completelly. It's a latent pain that sits behind your heart, just above your stomach and it's always there. You don't feel it all the time, you can laugh, you can be in love, but every now and then, when you're alone, sitting in the dark, thinking about a travel you want to make or that book you want to write it comes back, hits you hard and you feel it - it's there. The mark of that one time, that one day when you felt like you could do anything, you could be anyone, anywhere. That one person that meant all of that.

He wasn't a person, he was a meaning, a feeling, a mark. He was something that showed her and tolf her she could be whatever she wanted, that she could write her book, she could travel the world, she could be so much more than the world offered her, lovely, kinder, smarter, better.

And then reality drops by to say hi. She can't travel, she can't write her book, she's not that smart or that pretty, she's not as good as he thinks she is. He's biased, he can't see right, she's fine, she's good but she's not much beyond "normal".

She can be, eventually. She'll work hard, whenever she feels that pain, she'll work harder. Pain stimulates, pain makes you feel alive, makes you walk, makes you talk... Makes you write.