The shape of the letter U tends to reflect smiles that creep up on sagging faces in times of trauma.

Each finger: tapping, hitting, scraping, teasing each letter key. Putting ideas into thoughts and thoughts into hate and hate into words and words into a story and a story into a love affair.

         Ink, slowly creeping up upon the unknown white ahead of it, marking the landscape with its tribe, settling.

         Love songs, crazily enveloping your brain until you remember what their eyes looked like, what their hands felt like. Memories that force you to sit and just type and type until your fingernails are jagged and cracked because it is now sun rise and you do not feel any better. You keep typing anyways.

         It’s caused madness, it will continue to cause madness. It’ll settle in your chest until finally you’re running around Wonderland with Alice wearing a giant hat and Mad is your first name. Writing is brutal. Lovely, but oh, so brutal.

         It’s easy to type a paper and say, “I write because.” and finish it off with a few poorly written poems you stole from your fifth grade sister’s English homework. It’s easy, but it wouldn’t be true. It wouldn’t be pure. It wouldn’t accomplish anything.

         I do not write. I bleed letters. I sit down, and I just bleed. Don’t credit me for that idea, Hemingway said it first. He did the same thing. As did Austen, Fitzgerald, Vonnegut, King, take your pick. None of them chose to write either. You must, you absolutely must write, for the sake of your bones. So they do not ache with “could bes” and “maybes.” You force yourself to write, even when you feel the knife in your back and the poison on your tongue. You must. I must.

         How else would brown eyes be called any word but brown? How else would I get paper cuts from turning pages? How else would ink splatter onto eyelashes and call it home? How else would you let go of your first love? How else would you grip onto your second? How else would sunsets and clouds be written into eternity? How else would history be remembered?

         My heart lies in alliteration. My legs walk on Onomatopoeias. My brain runs on oxymoron’s. My veins fill with emotions.  It has never been a thought; I have simply just written. Words float above my head, ones only I can see, taunting me-daring me- to bring them to life. Dictionaries scream my name, asking to pick one of their pages for my next poem. I have never had to think about what writing is, or how to do it, it has simply been muscle memory.

         It is why I come home on late nights. It is why I have room in my lungs to breathe. It is why I have this back and forth relationship with metaphors.

         Poems write me to sleep. Typewriter keys are my lullaby. You see, I don’t type this semi-poem at your expense; to be some sort of half introduction to why I love writing. To be quite frank, I don’t love writing. I find it to be dirty, gritty, heart-wrenching work. But it shapes me into a new person every time I expel a word. This is not the introduction to why I write: this is why I write. It is so I can attempt to find a new destination, to find the harmonies, to see the despair, to tattoo adjectives upon my skin, to simply be.

         I am just trying my hardest to survive the only way I know how.