Living on a pitchfork with whip in my tail, there were only two things I needed to say: I am not here and I haven't got time for this. It was only a matter of time before the right-handed part of me looked back at the left-handed and laughed.

This came out of me in my white notebook. These notebooks are fictional. The notebooks don't exist. They are real, but in a strictly physical sense of my owning them, possessing them, or even planning to possess them they are a figment of my imagination.

There are notebooks.

There are notebooks in stacks, and I have green ones emblazoned with the University of Washington logo, purple ones, blue ones, maybe even a white one, certainly some red and some black ones, their spiral-bound cardboard covers dulled from their original glossy sheen, scribbled all over with Sharpie pen ink bled and smeared, Bic pen ink gouged into the colorful veneer with all manner of slogans, sayings, and scratched-out words. Abandon hope, all ye who enter was one of my favorites.

At one time I believed I was living in hell, that this world was a literal punishment for something I had done at some time in the past that I could not remember, or a punishment perhaps, if the Lord were especially vindictive, for something I might do in a predetermined future. These notebooks contain the sum total of my soul's desire to prove itself worthy of existence, and should they never see the light of publication, I will be much blessed for the fact. There is very little a soul can say to justify, in the Valley of the Shadow or the Garden of Eden alike, its existence. The absolute glory of creation is enough, isn't it?

There are notebooks. The notebooks I have kept since I was old enough to want to express myself in the written word and young enough to believe that this would make a difference. Now it is something I simply live, day in and day out. If I were to stop writing for any considerable period of time, I would lose something in myself, something intangible but central to the fiber of my being. The core of what I am would melt and I would be adrift again in the Arctic Sea of my own conscience. I write. My dreams and hopes and desires and fears, stories I have made up and haven't made up yet, poems to soothe the burning infamy of consciousness; all these things flow from me.

But the notebooks to which I refer in italicized bookends in my short blog entries, these are simply fanciful mechanisms. For water to flow from a sink, one must turn the faucet, and to turn the faucet off to stop the flow again. The notebooks are valves, with multi-colored handles, listless and impatient.

Promises kept and days ended, the wordless widow kept her watch. The cottage smelled like fresh flowers, and few visitors ever made it this far down the path to her little villa in the sun. The path, overgrown with brambles and sunk in marsh-water, was not easy to tread, after all. With her sewing and cooking, she had enough to do, but was always more than gracious with any visitor.