I’m sitting at the top of my world. My tray of tea things – really just a cookie sheet and some dirty dishes – grows cold beside me as the gray sky brightens towards noon. I call it my garret room, as if a word alone can turn the overwhelming clutter into something poetically dismal.

“Whiskey, whiskey, whiskey,” sings my computer, and I have another sip of cold Earl Grey.

I’m going to write a story about cosmos. I’ll title it “Past a Field of Cosmos,” and I’ll laugh at the misunderstandings that arise. Cosmos are my favorite flowers. When I can come up with a universe delicate and bold enough for them to live in – when I can paint with words that breathe like Monet’s Water Lilies from a distance, and show all the wonderful detail of a Robert Doisneau print under scrutiny – I’m going to write about them. I’ll write and show people how the world can exist inside a single flower.

Until then I sit here and make little pen sketches – 650 words or less. They die before they live. Already forgotten by the time I go back to proof read. If I had a little more of the starving artist about me I think they could really be something. Pathetic, you know, in the Victorian sense. But I find that I have a much higher value on food than on sentiment. I like it, sure, but you can’t live on weepy-eyed pessimism – you need something with strength and vibrancy at least now and then.

So I practice vibrancy in the sketches. Imagining the click-click of my keys as the scratching of a feather pen and the sharp return of the space bar as the report of a type-writer. One day I will be able to work words out of iron and harness a star to shine amongst my thoughts, but until then I send these sketches out to the world like little paper lantern-wishes. May they each shine brightly in the dark, little as they are.