I cannot delete words once I have written them. Essay thesis sentences, first lines of haikus, endings of short stories, however unclear and complicated they may be, I don’t delete or edit them, I put them at the bottom of the page, “saving them for later,” hoarding my words because I feel like they’ll one day be useful in something I write.

My words are not typed, but glued, fastened, clinging tightly so that once they are written, I have no choices but to keep them, somewhere else but always existing.

A life like this means always creating, constructing letters next to each other, creating, creating, creating, until I will be perched, cross-legged, on a mountain of my life’s words, an unseemly amount of meanings I will have accumulated.

Ignore the purple ink-marks on your handed-back essay, I will have told myself, the “cut this down“‘s and the “too wordy“‘s. I will have made more and more combinations of letters, and people will urge and beg me to please, start editing, stop creating, but I will have turned my head and blocked my ears, all the while writing more.

These words are part of me, I will have said. I can’t cut them down or cut them off. I’m going to go out on a limb and say, I like my arms and legs, not one but every one of my limbs, these words are my limbs, thousands of limbs I now have.

As I sit perched, I will have yelled each written word in the mountain under me, writing and creating and never letting go of letters I have made.