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My memories were once based on gas stations and shin splints, choosing calorie memorization over Chemistry 101. And in those times between the laps around my neighborhood I learned that commitment was a crime. And the sort of punishment they handed out was for not being brave, for giving in to certainty, for choosing comfort and stability over the open road.

So that’s why it was no surprise when she said she’d write you and didn’t; why you text her and she received all but did not reply to any; why when you finally couldn’t stand the silence and took the pen in your hand as a last resort, the letter you sent went unanswered. The sympathy you looked for was never returned.

And you waited for a forwarding address or P.O. Box because you knew she had turned off her phone and let the bill on her electric lapse so there was so no email address she checked. But nothing came. I tried to warn you. They all tried to warn you. But hearing the words and listening to the meaning always confused you.

"Read one hundred books. Write one"

After awhile life gets in the way, and you’re living not writing. You’re out, you’re in, you’re doing things. And these things have no description because you can't remember day to day. You find there is no suitable spot for a period so you can catch your breath, just conjunctions flowing into run on sentences, turning into pages upon pages of continuous movement. Not being, just moving.

The plot that you search for is weak and at times you can't justify why you're feet move so fast but you don't stop. You keep moving.

She said, "I want to be a writer."

And so she was. She filled up notebooks with sonnets and prose on the graying of cumulus clouds and how diet coke would fizzle and stale in the same way the smell of perfume fades overtime. She covered the backs of envelopes when the books were filled and moved to the white spaces on bills and magazines when the envelopes were covered. She took markers to her cayenne walls, crushing commas and exclamation points against the woodwork he had sanded down the summer before. She pulled out old receipts and photographs with tired people smiling with tired eyes, flipped them over and dug her pen against the backs of heads she couldn't see. Writing about people she knew and people she never met, or only met once.

It didn't matter how, it was a manic decision they said of hers, created out of desperation, the only thing that mattered was getting it, the things out.

Because once she thought it, but then said it- the sentence left her mouth and days no longer ended with darkness or began with the sun, food didn't matter, salon appointments were canceled and her legs shrunk in her jeans.