call me

How much of me you know, I cannot be quite sure. I will tell you simply my life is as unglamorous as they come. I am working girl, and hard it I must say. I strive daily to call myself a writer even if only the mirror. I struggle with time – both the concept and the actual passage. I create my own rules for punctuation that make me an outsider among most of my friends who are writers and their literary circles. I try to learn but I do not wish to change and that goes for both my writing and my personal life. Always learning. For the holidays I have been working a great amount. I serve tables and pour coffee. I drive to remote liquor stores and sell bottles of Scotch for eighteen ninety-nine. All the while, I am working on my craft, on my arsenal, on Clementine. All the time I spend away from my writing I spend trying to get to know her. Every conversation I have with a stranger I try to think of what she would say, how she would rest her hands, and where her eyes would wander during conversation. I learned today that she chews gum. There are all these methods, all these movements that are particular to her. It’s like dating someone new. I have to learn all the different aspects of her person. You’re confused. I keep saying “learn.” But I made her, didn’t I? It sounds silly but at the very best of moments, no, I did not make her up. She makes herself up. She is in many ways as real to me as you are. I learn her. Her nature is carved from the endless recesses of my subconscious. She writes the same way my best friend did in the fourth grade. She wears her hair like a girl I saw in church just one time, but never forgot. She loves like me. They say write what you know. I don’t know what that means. I write because like money it burns a holes through my pockets. I can’t carry these moments and ideas around. They are heavy and make me tired and they wont stop calling to me until they find their way to the page. So, while I am tending to the many tasks the world asks of me, I force upon myself the endless duty of thinking for writing. My hope is tomorrow I can still call myself a writer.