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And it’s not the first step to write anymore.

That used to be it, with the promises of five minutes a day because five inevitably turned into twenty or thirty or an hour of time stolen from grocery carts and commercials and dishes washed once in the sink to be washed again in the machine. The effort, the arm-wrestling not to edit but to write… that battle we fought and finished and won. We robbed sleep and wrote, typed, around the point of dawn: just before and just after the tip of day, Aurora’s sword.

We printed and compiled and marked up and clipped and copied and collated for the critics, too friendly to be critical, and distilled in brown envelopes for the agents, too invested in word counts to be critical.

Now the first step is to remember.

Did I write? Why was that? I recall arguing with myself about the target of my attacks. Was it me, or them, or it? Write to be read? Write for yourself? Write because you have no other choice. Perhaps it was for the opportunity to put “Writer” as my profession on the marriage certificate and tax forms. My descendants charting the spider lines of their blood will see that and elevate me to some vague pedestal, like the huntsman who knew the huntsman to the nephew of royalty.

Was he a poet, a tragic figure, too good to be published, too pure to be read? Living off ramen packages and bourbon (absinthe’s time having passed) and drunk only on the thought of thought, the idea of writing, the political irrelevance of more?

Did he feed his family with that title? Did I plan to make any money? I remember other people telling me how much I would make, how the publishing of my novel would set me free from ties and meetings.

And it may have been that I did it as an experiment or an exercise, to toughen my will and flex my mental muscle, to stuff active voices into dead machines and dead trees and prepare myself for the day: I didn’t used to be this way. Once I wrote.

I can’t remember. It’s all slippery and locked up and found only in some Sierra canyon when everyone I know is dead from plane crashes and I walk the earth like Cain and find the dawn again in big rocks.

So I never knew and worked off the sharp corners until I sat as a stone in a river.

And the only way to crack off crust is to write again.