Erasure--noun, the removal of all traces of a thing. The inevitable and undignified death of a story that burns at your brain for years. You want to write it, you need to write it, it's as vital as the blood in your veins but the words that were so crisp and taught in your head dissolve like ink on wet paper, smudging and smearing the essence. So you try again. It's the snowflakes you believe you can hold but that melt away in your palm. Like the snowflakes, it's disappearing fast--30 days become 30 years and the fire in your brain is cooling to embers. Immediacy is scratched out words and crumpled papers on wood floors. Obsession is sleepless nights, coffee, and the empty reams of paper that you bought from the store, laying in (disuse misuse forgetfulness?) shame on the ground. Life is marked by the steady (ticking? pace? measure?) ticking of time that you (often frequently never) forget and by the number of words in the dictionary that you marked off because you (forever search for, long for, crave the right word but it simply never arrives) can't find one to fit right. Nothing is as it ought to be, nothing (is the way you described it in your head, it's never the way you described it in your head, the words aren't coming out quite right, again) works. Your words feel (foreign? strange? awkward? unknown?) like strangers, strangers you've seen everyday on the train that suddenly have disappeared (perhaps they're on vacation, they've just been on vacation, they haven't moved away like you know they have). You rewrite again. You (take all your words that were bottled up inside you and pour them into your frustration, but you've hit that brick wall again and you feel the words gathering on the other side, but you can't release them) crumple it up. You grab a fresh sheet of paper, but you're out this time. You grab a napkin instead (and wait for the words to finally pour forth and hope that you've got enough to make it over the wall this time). Time to start anew.