The Roughest Draft

What I can do is protect myself while I pursue what I love.

I’ve worked my entire adult life to marshal the English language into whatever I wanted. But were I to try to capture Katrina with it, it would best even me.

When I kiss her, crushing her to me, losing myself in her scent and her skin and wanting every inch of her, it’s with the passion I’ve withheld for weeks—for years. It’s the kind of kiss that closes a book. But this time, it doesn’t.

This time, it’s only the beginning

“I love you,” she says.

“I love you, too,” I reply. I meet her eyes. There’s nothing original in the declaration, nothing perfectly crafted, no elegant metaphors, no profound prose. It’s a sentence every writer has used, one every person has spoken. It’s ordinary, common. And it’s perfect. The sentence captures what I couldn’t in hundreds of my finest pages. I wouldn’t change a word.

“I know her.” I hate how well I know her. It’s not the fundamental things I wish I could unlearn

Depression and anxiety will be there. I can’t simply choose to live without them—like I can’t simply choose to live without writing.

I’m doing it because it demands to be done.

I don’t know that happiness is the goal, really. Not always. It’s a woman’s voice. The reply is in a man’s. If we’re not doing this to be happier, then why, Evelyn?

To find out who we are again, Evelyn says.

In moments like this, it’s so hard to reckon with everyone else’s life just continuing on, independent of mine,

For once, I want to live the pain instead of dressing it in fictional clothing.