Driven by Grace A. Halliday-Miller. A Page.

Change. Change makes it harder to start something. Like this page. I have an entire blank page to fill up before it's gone and passed.

People pass away like pages, like sheets that I need to clean because mine are dirty. Dirty because birds shit on my car hood. Dirty because I haven't showered in a week.
Well, I have. But sometimes I don't.

Elbows perched to the point where they dig into the table, as if it were dirt, but it's marble, cold hard marble of conglomerate. At one point, the pieces were all tiny tiny rocks that my baby feet stepped on. Now they make contact with another part of me, a part of me that isn't ready to think of baby me.

I will begin this paper with gusto till I gradually disappear in the writing. Till my skin cells shed off on your wool sweater. Till I don't exist anymore except my marrow.

My body is made up of little more than a few things. I exist because of coffee, eggs and wine. Water and osmosis of what I am, soaking in the rain as I walk, but cotton kills so I change out of my wet shirt into a drier one. Not that dry. Not that clean. But enough so that I can fall asleep in it, underneath the quilt. Unless I open the window I sweat, and hear the light breathing of her across the room, mumbling her dreams into my open ears.

I go to school to get smart. Perhaps I'm not smart yet. Street smart, most definitely not. First, we need to start a street gang, rob old ladies' purses of dog treats and candy, become rich, and split the spoils. If we ran the road, there's no telling what would happen; perhaps I'd go to jail or run away from home.

If I were an African bride, I would not hold a chicken in my fist, but a sunflower that pointed toward the sun and bright orange moon. You are an orange moon that reflects the light of the night, street lamps and stars. But now a brainstorm must fall on the earth.

Bits of gray matter that collect in rain barrels, providing fuel for crops and bitter soil. Bitter soil and root that have not seen honey in many moons. Vitamins far better than in pill form.

In Response.

I often don't know what I'm going to write about when I start. The pen will generally fight with my mouth or head. In fact, I shout at the pen. Not literally. Proverbially. Jesus said proverbs that made absolutely no sense to anyone except to Jesus. The point? Was there one? God better not have told stories to Him/Herself. This would make me furious. Or just slightly peeved.

I become easily frustrated with myself and others lately. And the more I write, the more I realize this really is a journal entry. You should appreciate the frankness and candor with which I speak. In fact, I keep writing EYE EYE EYEYEYEYE statements all over the hellish world, discussing myself and what EYE think and what EYE feel, not EWE.

How are you? Are you eating an orange? The library is quiet, and my friend is far away. She is doing alright, as am I. What if we were both WONderful? It would be fairyland and sprinkles on the cupcakes of the world. Hopefully there would be chocolate cake. There is juice in the dirt that I want to drink, and I've taken to the habit of tasting the bark on trees, and feeling the texture of twigs beneath my thumb and forefinger. Rub rub rubbing the rubles of the trees the gems that not everyone sees but only a select few. Grandmother oak and maple perhaps knight three of us each year in approval.

I worry that no one else does anything, thinks anything like this. Then how will the two of us get together and climb trees and make love and babies forty years down the road? How will we storm Washington and pirate Her Majesty's navy? Your aura is purple and where are all my friends... When I tell people I love them I mean it, but I'm so damn uncomfortable, because I'm worried it's not reciprocal like the red flower that hugs the hood of my car.

This might be nonsense.