Penalized

I am a writer. That means I hang my agony on a turn of phrase. Take all night to write this sentence and I am a bad husband. Take all day to write this sentence; I’m a selfish son of a bitch. Massage the predicate for a week, neglectful father. Every syllable crammed between my imagined, gothic drop cap and this so very lonesome a period gets scribbled and replaced, arranged iamb, remade dactyl, then trashed. Delete, delete, delete. Come one month, I can be sure my mother will be the last soul who’ll see any good left in me. At eight I’m disowned. If I take a year to write this sentence, I am invisible to everyone but God, and I will have given him no reason to even glance at me. Twenty-five of those, fixated, and I become that committable type of crazy. I am a writer. I am older than you think. This is my death sentence.