After a year of talking to you, I’ve realized I like my writing too. That might be one of the most important things I take away from this. “You give a personality to everything, Sharla.”
The world breathes.

Eventually our heroine makes it out of bed to get dressed and eat something for the first time in nearly 24 hours, even if it’s 3 in the afternoon, even if the farthest she makes it is to the desk across her room. Eventually she will answer all her texts with invites for hot fudge sundaes and indoor picnics with yeses; eventually she will say no to the one asking if she’s sure she wants to be alone. That day is not today, though. Today is not hers. Today the texts bombarding her phone and notes slipped under her door and break-up survival packages (chocolate, movies, non-thinking books) left at the bottom of the stairs are enough. Just the ideas are enough.

She drinks some tea and breathes. It is enough.

I have this friend in a wheelchair who writes the most awful stories, but I always spent hours editing them for him because he was in a wheelchair, as if that thing should’ve protected him from his terrible writing and uninteresting, unfocused stories. As if it were my job to do the protecting, as if he weren’t a full-grown, intelligent man. He wanted to write a book. I’d think, he can’t run anymore, he can’t even really speak well anymore, I should at least let him go places with his pen.

I’m sorry, Jeff. With anyone else I wouldn’t have worked so hard, and that would’ve made me a truer friend.

Truthfully, though, I hope he’s still writing.

Well you should always have rope
just in case
just in case you need to escape
down a cliff face
just in case you need to bind
someone, maybe for treason
or maybe for sex
just in case you need to hang
things behind you, keep them safe
from bears or yourself, maybe

You should always have rope
just in case you need to tie
a reminder to your little finger
with some awfully big rope
because it’s something you shouldn’t forget
some life lesson you learned in 2008
and 2009 and 2010 and 2011
head after head
heart after heart
and of course it was always new
because you never had that rope
to bulge off your finger, a growth
a piece of arthritis
a testament to learning
just in case
you don’t want to be learning the same
lessons for a decade
so bring enough rope
just in case

You know, the problem usually is that I take these things too seriously. I like writing, so who cares if I’m a “writer?” I just like putting words together. I doodle.

I want to write about softer things. Not sad things, not angry things–soft things. Soft things like the drooping tulips in my kitchen–drooping but not dying. Maybe reaching more than anything. Exploding.

The air travels through me when I run sometimes. There’s a point when my rhythm is right and my breathing is right and the air just runs through me. Strange and natural, this breath. It’s not forced but it’s not soft. It is simply how the air travels (and air is not soft). The air goes through my lungs and right out through my back, from between my shoulder blades. People tell you that you should breathe in through your nose and out through your mouth but the truth of the matter is, when you do it right, it’s in through your mouth and then right out your spine. You slip through the air and it slips through you. Much better than all that stumbling you and the air are used to doing with each other. Much better than all that racket with panting and talking and cigarettes. This is just the wind. You are just the wind.

I cannot write stories so I write snapshots. I will not be a writer, everyone. I will not be a writer.