I liked to collect things. I would keep them in important boxes, decorated with stickers and glitter and purple marker. The copper ring with silver triangles on it I got when I put a quarter in the machine at the hockey rink. A rock that looks like every rock but didn't then. A button and a little bear that's head can turn all the way around. I would display them around my room, carefully aligned in order of importance. A collection of my childhood.

The late summer weather was just warm and sweet enough to make me lay back against the warm brown brick and somehow think that three years was the blink of an eye and it was all so blissful and perfect. Bittersweet sadness grasped my throat in an intoxicating swell. Maybe the last beautiful day of the last beautiful year of my young life in the greatest city in the world. Ah, is there anything more poetic than self pity. My finger brushed down to pick up my hat with such a light touch I couldn’t be sure if i grabbed it but I didn’t care enough to look down and check.

I painted my room salmon when I was almost 14. I painted it badly, there's ugly streaks near the border that, if the color choice wasn't enough, remind me of my impulsivity. I'll have to repaint the room before we sell the house. I never put anything up on the walls, it's just four solid walls of salmon completely surrounding me, in the center. My mom tried to tell me to paint just one wall salmon, but I like to commit. Maybe the next girl that moves in here will paint it purple.

Have you ever heard of a sky prison. I don't know if thats the name of it or if it's even real but I saw it on tv once and it bothered me. The man was in a cell, high up in a tower, and one wall was missing. He was so scared, he would back up against the furthest corner and stare out into the hole. When I lay in bed I pile my blankets like a fortress around me. I create the space around me, limiting what I can see. A pannel of a wall or square of hard wood floor in the singular light beside my bed haunts me. The emptiness of the space is a disease that spreads like cancer. If the man in the sky had just turned his back to the hole instead then the prison would no longer be so scary. Space, empty space, is dangerous.

Foot rolls like the flick of a wrist shooting hoops. Toe to heel, same movement more height. More spring, more bounce, more alive. New York is more New York when I move like this. When I can feel my heart and my heel and my clothes pushed against my body by the wind. Bumping shoulders, dodging cabs, hearing the man playing jazz underground as I grab the rail and fling my body up the stairs out the subway. The music plays and the scenes stream by in tune, all in tune, the perfect pace like it was designed for and it all feels right.

Mmmm I want to be in a cotton commercial. I want to lay on a bed with white sheets that are warm from the dryer and warm from the sun and warm from my bed and breathe it all in. I want a warm hand on my back that I can feel for the rest of my life. I want to be cotton. Fresh and soft and warm, so warm.

When people ask me what my favorite book is I can't remember it's name. I know I was in elementary school, and I was sitting on a stool in the library. The book described a young girl, the same age as me, during World War II, eating a piece of lemon candy. Some boy gave it to her and it was a big deal because of the rations. The whole book up to that point I'd pictured a dull gray, but this scene was technicolor. I sat curled over on the stool pressing my chest against my legs and I felt the lemon taste and I fell in love with reading.