Thread by @julianalbrandt

We write.
We draft.
We edit.
We read. We critique. We revise. We dream. We study. We learn. We plot. We re-plot. We re-write. We listen. We wake in the night, sleep-weighted fingers dumping notes into phones, "yoga who green thirteen behind" to interpret in the morning.

We breathe fire onto laptops, setting alight garbage drafts. We shape mashed potato sculptures made of ash. We compare. We judge. We fidget and fret. We worry. We sit in confused silence and we ask for help.

We breakdown what we know and what we don't, and stare into the void of "what we don't", eyes squished nearly shut, lashes forming atoms in our vision, the universe severed into slivers of which we can catch hold.

We stare at white space and name it empty. We make shadow puppets against the blank page and outline their shapes with letters--bunny, duck, hunger, revolution, butterfly, that memory of promising a friend to stay in touch and looking back at the hiccups in time that made us fail

We thread blunt needles with filament dipped in soul-blood and darn holes worn in memories we've replayed twenty-eight-sixty-eleven-thousand times.

We ask questions. We sleep. We stop writing. We forget. We remember. We hold words between our teeth the same way we hold fear in our lungs and anger in our palms. We press pads of fingers to keyboards and brace pencils against the meat of our hands.

We alight with joy. We uncover secrets. We talk with characters as we would talk with friends or enemies or that lady in the grocery line who asked what we use flax seed for. We pull back veils and tuck our words in, telling them family secrets as one would a bedtime story.

We write. We don't write. Is it ever writing? It's not writing.

It's the sorrow and fury and aching hope that line our fingerprints pressed against the page. It's the last breath before we fall asleep stoppered up in a vial. It's the dream we're too frightened to speak aloud.

It's not writing.

We write.