Writing is a long summer of sipping soft clouds of words through a straw, riding a bicycle with your best friend, climbing up to your secret tree house, lighting a candle with matches you’re not supposed to have, playing paper-rock-scissors as water glimmers on the lake of your mind and you peer into this solemn place where two children tiptoe onto a pond of ink, skip across an old wooden bridge over a deep wash of river and you are anxious white for them, but they forget danger like a mouthful of cotton candy and a carnival of memories, memories being the alphabet desiring the open field of dry paper, thousands of letters escaping in a marching line traveling across white plains to meet the two children who can walk backwards to catch a fish or a train or even fly, but not at the same time and often enough, they just wait alone at a bus stop on a crowded corner in a noisy city or take two steps back to the witch’s palace without stepping on a crack, but eventually, they run away to be with you in your small room, where you sit in your chair, at a wood table, the thin paper fluttering in a breeze slipping in from the open window, the pen poised in your hand, your fingertips resting on the page, remembering the long journey of two children when a door opens inside your mind and you finally make a single mark, then another and another. And another.

It all adds up.