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Hey

Remember when I used to drink herbal tea and write for hours about whatever?
Like when I wasn't trying to make money or really accomplish anything in particular in life except full pages and empty pens?

An empty Bic pen was such a massive achievement. It meant you had written so much that you actually needed a different writing utensil. The amount of work that the empty plastic casing represented was enough to send shivers down a nine year old's spine.
Ok that was a weird sentence.

I used to have so much FUN decorating pages with whatever stream of consciousness and crayons happened to create at the time. And then I'd get to go back and fill the pages with dumb stories or Victor comics or boys or descriptions of mundane events and people that made my life seem more exciting than it really was.

Like the pink clouds.
THE PINK CLOUDS.

DO YOU SEE THE PINK CLOUDS??

HOW MAGICAL THE PINK CLOUDS WERE.

This makes sense to approximately -45% of my readers. It barely even makes sense to me.
But I read this book in elementary school, and while I remember nothing about the book itself, I remember that when they started building the subdivision across the street from my house, we would take walks after dinner. I remember seeing these pink clouds that looked exactly like those on the cover, and for whatever reason, I just got so elated by those clouds.

I imagine this feeling of intense joy is what Emily of New Moon's "flash" was all about whenever she experienced/felt/saw something of extreme beauty. That's one of the main reasons that book is my favorite of all time.
Because it gets me.

I'd hardly ever go on a swim meet without my massive 150-page spiral notebook so I could scribble all the day's dialogue and high school drama onto the sheets, sprinkled with teenage angst, Taking Back Sunday lyrics and character sketches.
Oh, the character sketches were the best.
Because, you know, some people look like certain things...

And I remember the time I promised myself I would write every single day because I wanted to stay in the habit or whatever of writing because I wanted to be like an author or something at some point or other.
I must have been a very disciplined 7th grader because I did indeed write every day- even if it wasn't about anything except that I ate soup for lunch and how pirates are awesome and mom made me fold laundry.

And then I started liking boys and my writing career as I knew it took off. Pages- nay, BOOKS written entirely about crushes, romanticizing every encounter to the point of barf-hood.
Printouts of instant message conversations, e-mails, piecing together conclusions I found regarding the following two earth-shattering questions of a naive 15 year old girl:
what did he meeeeeeeeeeeeean
why doesn't he like meeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee

Some of it is SO INCREDIBLY GIRLY I can't even stand to read it.
Which makes me glad that I wrote it down and kept it to myself instead of telling everyone and making myself seem like a high school stalker spaz.
Then again, I have no idea what people thought about me except for what they wrote in my yearbook.

"Have a great summer!"

Mostly, I just concluded that I think too much and everyone else is stupid.
No need to write nice things if no one can decipher my handwriting anyway, right?

And then I apparently did a series of "Seriously WTF comics" drawn in the margins of the composition book which I would do really late at night or when I was feeling especially loopy. It was like a stream of consciousness with a pseudo-plot and illustrations. Kind of like how dreams are.
SCARY, but actually quite entertaining upon closer inspection.

Sometimes- rarely, but sometimes- I would write a really good story. My senior year, we had "writing time" in Mrs. Heath's AP Lit class, and I wrote this story about two olives that fall in love in Italy and instead of saying "I love you" they say "Olive you" and it is absolutely adorable, complete with a fancy font, illustrations and even fine dining puns.

And then, of course, you probably know about The Specificity of My Phenomenal Maneuver, a satire of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. This unfortunately, boys and girls, is less impressive than we originally thought. It's laden with inside jokes of which I am far too removed to remember, and the immaturity level of it all makes me, well, squirm. So that is a work of art better left on the shelf. Alone. Forever.

Then college happened, and I was decidedly obsessed with writing about how much crap I had to do and how much earlier I could graduate and move back home if I did x, y, and z. But then z was going to take longer than I thought, so if I reschedule y to happen during z, then I could do it as originally planned.
Does that make sense to you?
Yeah, me neither.
A lot of my books during sophomore/junior year are filled with rants about classes or friends or student accounts.

Oh, student accounts. You gave me such good writing material.

Then I broke up with my boyfriend of three and a half years, and my life got fun and hilarious with such lifelong characters, namely Mike and Mark. Also, I started drawing and designing clothes among the pages. A few more rants about business intelligence and marketing class...

And then I was pretty much done.
I stopped writing consistently. I stopped telling stories. I'd write down some quotes here and there:

Mike and I frequently argue about the temperature of the house.

Mike: IT IS SO HOT IN HERE. I'M SWEATING. I'M GOING TO HAVE TO TAKE ANOTHER SHOWER BECAUSE I'M SWEATING SO MUCH.
Me: You're not sweating. Your body is just crying because it's sad that it is so cold in here.

But I can't really say why I stopped writing for myself. It's not that it became less fun. I just lost the excitement, the purpose, the fervor (PINK CLOUDS!!!) that it all meant to me.

My life was a story.
It was a true story.
It had a purpose and a plot.
And I was the protagonist.

I think once Mike and I knew we were going to end up together, I felt no need to write a epilogue because my life already had a happy ending.

But I've realized I need to keep writing. I need to keep that ability to be creative and to keep the record so that the grandchildren that I don't have will know that I existed.

And that my life and the people in it were awesome.

My story isn't over,
TWS