Kelly

In kindergarten her sweet voice explains what a paragraph is to a room full of bright eyed five year olds but you're the only one that listens. You write a story about your best friends and it wins runner up in your school's young author competition. 

In third grade you write a story about Pluto, the not planet that will forever be a planet in your heart. You share your third place prize with another girl. 

In fourth grade you write a story about a girl you don't like dying hidden behind a thin guise that in the story she's a mouse, and you don't really want her to die in real life. Your teacher re-writes the ending to be happy and submits it to the competition. 

You don't even place. 

In fifth grade you spend too much time with your best friend at the time. The two of you blow up an air mattress with nothing but your own breath but her cat pokes holes in it with her claws.  You guys spend the rest of the night crafting stories on blank pages ripped from an old science workbook about what would happen if you were trapped in a hurricane floating on an air mattress. 

Later that year you write your own stories and share them with each other at three in the morning while Taylor Swifts 'You Belong With Me' plays in the background. The characters you create never leave those walls. 

The summer after sixth grade, you go a different friend's house. You stay up all night playing Sims and writing a story going back and forth on sheets of paper. 

Later, she'll buy a notebook and she'll pass it around with friends to continue the story, but you'll be excluded. 

You decide you want to go to college to write but they tell you it's a bad idea. You want to change the world, so you say you'll be a lawyer. You go to a college with no creative writing program. You write on the newspaper because writing has always been there for you.

 Even when your friends weren't. 

Maybe it's not profitable but you can't, you won't, leave it behind. Not now. Not ever.