I sat down to begin writing this a long time ago. The trouble is, I always sort of assume that my mind will open up like split melon before the computer (which is a depressing thought, because things always seem more romantic when you have to scribble them down into leather-bound volumes, probably in Africa, probably about your safari guide's malaria, probably after having just eaten a lion with your hands while gazing into the hills while Meryl Streep narrates). But it doesn’t. In fact, I have almost nothing to say. Whenever I try to write anything at all, I imagine how it will look in a printed book with a cover on each end and the price tag which will indicate how much money I will have gotten from the billions of thirty readers who stood in line in the aching cold to buy it. Usually, though, I can’t even get my mother to read my writing. But she is usually busy teaching the dog how to ignore simple tasks like sitting and heeling in lieu of more interesting commands like “eat whatever undergarments you can find except for the clearest indicator of what sort of undergarment it is, and then leave that part on the  living room floor." But back to not having anything to say.

My pursuit of writing has probably been less about a need to express my insides than it has been an attempt to resurrect my ego after a blow it took in third grade. It was then that I first learned what it means to hate everything about a person. That is an exaggeration, but I’m a student of literature and have been trained in hyperbole. Her name was Kimmy, probably, and her paper was held up alongside mine and praised for its superiority. My thinly crafted scribbling was mocked didactically to a classroom full of chirping birds drooling over their fruit snacks.

            This early horror catapulted my education through the English major. At this point in the paragraph, I could spin into a drawn-out sweet nothing about the literary canon. I’d rather not do that, because that doesn’t sound like a paragraph I’d like to read. Instead, I think I’ll tell you that the first time I was convinced I loved this boy I know, it was after having read a poem he wrote about shoveling. I swooned, knees buckling and all.

i'm here again (here = harrisburg, this house, a life of intentionality and no dollars). i feel like exploding would be a good way to express all of the emotions i have.

here is what i have written on my hand in order to remember a story i wanted to tell someone:

twenty questions
ruth
ramadan
sex

the person who can most closely guess the actual story will win a prize of magnifcence.