I'm no Gwenolyn MacEwan.

Yesterday pretty much made me want to slip into a coma. And then I did. Face down across the bed, fully clothed. Didn't even take off my shoes. I don't know how I managed to get myself home after everything started to look like it was photoshopped to High Contrast and all I could see was the white light to heaven. Or at least that's what it looked like at the time. I thought I was dying, but I woke up freezing at ten to six and peeled off my blazer, scarf, moccasins, thinking that while the experience was horrible, the section in my poetic sequence about forays into substance use and abuse (which I will start as soon as my poetic morale rehydrates and no longer resembles a plum discarded on a sunny sidewalk and left to croak and wither) would be fabulous.

This is when you know you're a real writing major: when you wake in the blue hours before dawn thinking only in images and distilled language even though you're still wasted and your mouth tastes like craft glue because searching for a toothbrush in complete darkness is futile. This is how I know. This is how I know not to switch my major to Women's Studies or English Honors or Chemistry. I know. But there's this quote from a Lorrie Moore short story stuck in my skin like a wasp stinger even though I can't remember exactly how it goes because I was stupid enough to recycle all of my Writing coursepacks from last year instead of saving them for instances like this. It goes something like He asks you if being a writer is ever discouraging. You say it's like having polio, sometimes it is and sometimes it is. I need someone (and by someone I mean you, you with the sun-white hair and hips like ripe peaches) to tell me I have to do this. That if I don't do this, I will be wasting my life. And I'm not usually one to actively seek validation like this, but there you go. That's how the universe works sometimes, and this is just one of those days.