On writing. Again. On writing again.

I am writing so many things. There is a book review on a book I finished a week ago, a new book review that looms with the second half of the book I'm reading now. There is a letter over two months old, a story due tonight, at the latest. I just wrote an email and sent it off to its destination, which is to say I sent it to the third floor of this office building. In these cases, I am a writer. I write, I form words, string them together, send them along. But in so many other ways I am less a writer than I have ever been.

In college, I lived in a tiny room that got the most heat in the winter and the least breezes in the summer. The closet was large, but the room itself barely housed my twin bed, bookshelf, and desk. I lit my little cove with a lamp, and sometimes I'd sit for hours in front of my typewriter, hacking away at printer paper I stole from my roommate whose printer was out of ink anyway. I loved that apartment, that room, that space, that time, those hours. That confidence and promise that what I was writing was not so much good as on its way to being good. Being something, finished. I haven't had that confidence in a while. I've even stopped lying to myself that I'll wake up early in the morning to write. I sleep past my last alarm, roll out of bed well after the sun has begun its ascent.

Mike jokes sometimes that it's his fault, makes an exaggerated frown that ruffles the whisks of facial hair in the places that it bothers to grow. I always reassure him, No, it isn't you. And it isn't. And I'm happier; by the day, I have new and newer reasons to be happy. But I am wondering how far I will go away from that girl cooped up in her $500 closet of a room, with a budget item solely for typewriter ribbon. I miss her everyday. I think she'd like it here.

PS - That's my nook up there, my old roommate with the inkless printer.