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It started as a ploy, really. A Joshua's march around Jericho, a secret password into a treehouse club, a ladder up to a private hayloft hideaway.

I wasn't uncreative and I certainly hadn't offered up my shell to an adolescent minded diety for conversion into a life without blinders. But your blue velvet book had mystery -- a glow like a mosquito trap, something inticing and sweet as buttercream, something that I couldn't help but want to be. You wrote. You dreamed and wrote. I wasn't even sure I knew how to dream.

First grade. Young Authors', the arbitrary content, the way to take a five year old child and assume some potential for literary greatness. I had written poems then, and I had won. Poems about the holidays. Frilly and rhyming, illustrated with flat-faced people with L-shaped noses and stringy hair. Or limericks for classes and teachers and curriculums that stressed poetic form as a standard of knowledge, a setup to fare well on state aptitude testing.

This was new. There was no free verse apart from a soul cracked open and the fuzz separated from the nugget of teen anguished universal truth spouted in melodrama and hyperbole. Usually an organic process. But not for me. Hammer in one hand and soul in the other, I WOULD become a wordy blob of angst and self-reflection. I WOULD. Sheer willpower.

Make myself shiny and reflective and full of depreciating philosophy that someday I would outgrow. Release the butterflies from timid capture, become who you were, drape myself in the blue velvet of everything you cherished and fold myself into the book that never left your small writable hands. Sheer willpower. Gelatain morph and Jello mold myself into a Writer. Capital W. And a Dreamer. Capital D. And a Philosopher. Capital P.

Then you would notice me.