3,653 days

She grows, she dances, she reads — pretends to — she explains her thoughts with dancing hands; a butterfly learning to fly; beautiful, mine.

My mind, a storm of pixelated ideas; returning home.

At the playground with my 3 year old; I shook in anger as a father shook his 4 year old out of slide, grabs her painfully by the tiny arm, hits her butt hard a few times; mother quiet but terrified; he has that abusive face, the type you wish never became father... my heart aches for this little girl and am ashamed of my cowardice.

Took tram to library; scent of summer dew lingers towards the building, surrounding the pond; memories of novel Dutch summers deluged my soul.

Books pile on like a broken sink, leaking, a dripping at midnight you cannot ignore, faster than I can read; will I ever satisfy my thirst for words, is it pointless, unbounded?

It is beautiful to behold the arrival of my children at the library as if home; shoeless feet running to familiar nooks; the feeling in my chest knowing they are happy, free, safe — and so am I.

It lay there, recumbent, bridging two compartments, interposed between the bright neon yellow highlighter and the loud rainbow of sticky flags; singular, exposed, flush with the tray's edge — how did it end up there? — I wondered; perhaps the vending machine man simply forgot — as I see it, an anomaly, a disruption.

A long sigh of “ah” followed the moment gears set into place, perfect alignment, a pause, a click, the start of machinery at long last in place as I understood Virginia Woolf’s writing style and its affects on my own; the reason for my prose, my weaving of words into sentences and sentences into stories; stories of thoughts which I believed — until today — to be whimsical nonsense of a chaotic brain; while instead, it is alright, I am alright, my writing is alright; that here I am, and all I have to do is write.