A lot of funny things happened once she was dead.

I took up writing, if you can believe that. Nobody knows except Willow.

Not even Anya. Willow said it was because grief affects us all in funny ways, but she didn't laugh when I showed her the things I'd written. God know. I think the emotion she was trying to express would be best symbolised with tears.

I was writing poems. Good ones, too. At least that's what Willow said. Tara liked them too. She saw them but she didn't know they were mine. She said they 'showed fully the poet's innermost hatred of himself and the world around him'. I don't know if I hate myself, but I hate the world. I hate any world that can show me the things I've seen.

I tried to write about Buffy too, but there was something about her that

I couldn't catch. Some essence du Slayer that I couldn't encapsulate in a few words. It seemed too restricting, if you get what I mean. It seemed too much to ask to capture her in a sentence or two; to immortalise her in a rhyming couplet. Not that anyone did ask. I just wanted to try, to see if I could. And I couldn't. It's no big.

The one person I found it easy to write about was Dawn, for some reason.

Looking at her being so real and yet not being real was some kind of warped inspiration, though I'm damned if I know how. She found a loophole in my brain and grabbed hold. I didn't mind. Writing was something I liked to do before Buffy came back. I liked to tell someone how I was feeling about the world - how I was hating the world. Even if it was only a piece of paper. Some kind of therapeutic crap, I guess. I don't want to analyse it further than that.

Something happened when Buffy clawed her way out of her coffin and back onto planet Earth. I don't know if it's because her resurrection was a redeeming feature on the face of the earth. I don't know if somehow her coming back made up for all the bad things that exist. Maybe in a small way that's what it was. Maybe it was something else altogether. I know I don't want to analyse that, either. I'm a coward.

All I know is, I don't write any more, but Buffy's back, and that makes up for it. Harrises were not made to be writers, and I don't miss it. I don't miss it at all. Who'd be a writer, I mean... jeez. Xander Harris, big author? I don't think so. Still... I don't miss it. Not a bit.

Well.

Maybe just a little.