\ cut

I am more than happy to see myself cut to size, and don't need to page back very far in the journal to remind myself that it was me that used to do most of the hacking, until I became an unfunny joke at my own expense, and I noticed smoke, looked around, saw that I had lit dozens of tiny fires. I am not putting any of these fires out, they are nearly burnt out anyway, and although it is safest to fight from the black, I am going to light some entirely new blazes, see if I can't just spark a bit of the competitiveness that used to drive me through uncertain days on perpetually losing teams. This is all that used to matter so much, this form and function, and I had a teacher drill schemes into my head, ABAB, AABB, sonnet and rondel. I have scribbled into my journal, first page, courage in your writing. What follows makes hardly a bit of sense, not even in an i-suppose-i-could-see-what-that-MIGHT-represent kind of way, it is gibberish that the monkeys would fail to achieve generations after they had typed out Macbeth.

I loved my house until just recently, when I realized that there are no ghosts, and this palpable deficiency makes it very difficult to write what I know.

Somewhere along the banks of a dark river, a girl slips into the flat stream and turns over and over until she has nearly reached the other side, and the boy she is with thinks there must be two people out there, and with a bottle of wine between his knees, rubs his eyes and laughs about her funny accent and strange yen to break the surface of every body of water they come across. This boy is a ghost.