I want to tell you a story about how once I watched out my window for spring to arrive and in my impatience, I bought fabric online and stitched something I thought was beautiful and took photos of the flowers. About how I drove around this land’s elbow and wandered up and down the desert as if I knew the way, and how I was left with only acne and dirty laundry when I came home. I want to spell out the contours of this year—boring and existential—and offer the foolishness of thinking that maybe I could write better if I moved to Idaho. No plot, I know, but my year was like Kylie Jenner’s so long ago, and I’ve realized a couple things, like that all those women I followed on Instagram when I was 14 were as clueless as I am today and comfortable, somehow, with living out loud and on the internet. And I’ve learned that I am not interested in living out loud like that. I want to unleash myself. I want to make my mistakes in physical time and divorce my nipples from a software company. I want to commodify only the parts of myself I can already stand to lose. I am losing the thread. Let me try again. 

Let me tell you a story, like that in this place I sell myself; sell my grasp of Idaho and fabric and flowers. I split my hairs and put my money where my mouth is and try to keep quiet about it. (I brag in my sleep.) I rehearse my thoughts until they line up, measured syllables, no exceptions. I wash my sheets and tell myself I need to buy new ones and pretend I understand, wholly, why we keep writing about the internet. I try to follow suit. I don’t like what I make. I don’t like this story, I’m sorry. I’m trying to apologize less. 

I mean that once, I cut fabric into bits and made something new and posted in on Instagram as if I knew my worth. As if money were an object people were willing to part with. When I was wrong, I packed those bits of cotton and polyester away and took a walk and asked myself about manipulation and currency and time, and why I still value the sunset or a summer dress when I know nothing of how my own body moves, fast. When I am afraid of pap smears and know nothing but apologies stacked like Sunday breakfasts, I read someone else’s words and wonder what’s left to say and how we learn to say it, and I go searching again for vocabulary. When I am pensive I think of tripping on a story worth asking others to listen to, but I don’t yet know how to tell you what I’ve found. I’m trying, for now, to atone for my silence.