The First Word

All day I've been lounging in my pajamas reading poetry and novels, drinking tea, and pretending to chip away at the pile of scholarship applications sitting blank on my desk like a stone. I listened to music, washed away the bold lines of consciousness as I lost myself in others' lives. Pale light coming from the frosty outside bathed my body all day. I crept down to the darkness of my room and fell into a somber, waking dream.

Already 3:30 and the day is nearly done. I could write essays for scholarships, scribble down poetry, sneak away into the woods coagulated with snow and let adrenaline spark the cold wick of my creativity candle. If this will be my life as a professional writer - silent alarm clocks, a laptop blinking on a white desk with no one but myself encouraging me to open it - can I bear it? This loneliness?

I'm allowed to curl up in a little grey ball of coffee and chocolate and unwritten words and let a day drift by like smoke in a wind. It's beautiful. And even now I'm plucking the last few sweet crumbs of ambition from the ground.

Dad is snoring on the couch and our black cat Cletus is basking in his breath. The heater hums from the basement.

At least I've collected the papers, clipped them together, and placed the stack by my computer for another day's work. The pastel sky and clouds like a river of steam make me want to cry.
I've begun to gnaw at my lips and wonder if I really want to be a part of this world built of words.

I want chocolate.
I want lace.
I want that pattern from the sun when it slices through the blinds.
I want to crawl under the warm, dark covers filled with feathers and dream every last breath away. I have no favorite word now. Just sleep - like death - blooming in the back of my mind and my fingers digging into the cold, dark soil after a rain. I claw through the grass of this dream, cold and green glass glimmering in salty wetness. The earth will cover me and when the soft, churned soil hardens under the beat of rain, the heavy body of snow, the strange footsteps, I'll perish. I don't want a stone marking my grave. I want a tree. An oak or something fragile like birch. My skin will grow swarthy in the soil. Worms and the white, rumpled bodies of grubs will find tunnels and slits and rotted places where they can slip inside, begin to taste me, help my flesh decompose into my mother earth. Roots will wind around pale bones. Crush them. Squeeze them into powder. I will disperse after years have tumbled by like boulders set free. One great leap is death. One great leap and all these blue words will mean nothing when this language is reformed and replaced, reconstructed as dialects and cultures sweep their heavy arms over these delicate bits of language, like wind scrapping the shingles from a house.

They will be nothing. Just ink spilled onto paper in strange symbols.

But I won't give this up. I'm in love. And that's worth living for.