Even when I was her age, I had already wanted to be a writer. I felt like I was reaching for some great truth, frustratingly out of reach. One that I believed I could wrestle into form, make concrete. There was the string of lyrics in cursive painted sideways down the wall. A stanza from Poe behind an empty ornate frame that Maggie had found in a thrift shop. On the wall directly over my wooden headboard, a collection of the first and last lines from every novel I’d read during my senior year of high school, in my own secret project. A meaning I believed I could extract from the pattern.
