I'm looking at this screen blankly. Much in the way I've looked at variant versions of this same buzzing white screen during the past four years.

I look at it, waiting for something worth reading to wind its way out of some place between my ears and behind my eyes. I wait for some combination of shortened syllables and 10th-grade vocabulary words I've been hoarding in that almost tangible place for years and years. I wait for them to arrange themselves and fall from that place along the sides of my fingernails and onto raised keys, making irritating noises.

I'm looking at this screen, waiting to write.

It's frustrating and infuriating and absolutely intoxicating because once it starts happening, the words flow easily and, sometimes, perfectly, and I worship those words and wrap myself up in them because those words are my words.

They are precious words I rarely ever want to let go, save for the times they appear in experimental lines and cursive as misled, youthful poetry.

I wait for words about novelists and poets. Especially those who write about useless facts, their words forming maddening circles until the reader is left with some even more maddening truth.

Endless words arise about true poets. The poets whose flawless sentences are guitar chords and staccato beats and voices, piercing or unassuming, maybe falling somewhere in between.

I could write them into and out of corners and never quite find the words out of thousands to properly share them with another. I've written into the goose eggs on my forehead and the feeling of being betrayed by the artists I've loved. I've written of merely being in love. Of crying and trying to find the right sounds to burrow into and be lost. I've written of these songs and these voices and these noises that creep around these words and I'll never ever get it right.

I wait for words about people. The kids on the side of the streets in Seattle, blowing bubbles and not being ashamed of letting the world, or at least the whole city, know who they love. I've written words about kids with their artistry betrayed by their school. I've written words about kids, now young adults, picked up by the school around them, carried to places they never thought they would go.

There were, of course, words about myself. The words about the total fear and ecstasy of being 14, 15, 16, 17, 18. The elitist drivel that poured out when I grew so frustrated with the community around me that I thought my whole person could burst but only my ego did.

There were words about my family, too. My savior of a young mother and the hero of an immigrant grandfather. Reflected in each letter are the grandmother and father and brother and sister and aunt and uncle in-between.

I have found a way to address, with an unwise, barely veiled sheen, each boy I've dated and find comfort in the fact I could spite them in the way my words twisted around each other on paper, if not to their own faces, with my own voice.

My voice has a tendency to drown out the dimmed protests of other people when I sit down and stare at this screen and try to find myself in the words that pop up, letter by letter.

I am finding myself now. I find myself in each word I write and get dizzy with the power of this expression. If there was anything in the world I would never want to lose, it would be this: my fingertips tapping or looping in circles, at angles from glowing pixels or over blank pages.

I've been given an opportunity to have a voice. To find a voice. To give a voice.

And the words tumble out, they stumble and fall and rearrange themselves. Sometimes almost perfectly, sometimes so very far from it.

They spell out at least one truth: This is all I could ever want to do.

* Olivia Hernandez attends Davis High School.