peach pit in my stomach

1. Slept on the couch in the living room, listening to the sick dog breathing unsteadily, to her shifting in her bed (on a chair, under a fan) and standing up uneasily in the darkness, wanting something.
   


2. I'm writing fiction again because it's another way to write a list: names I like, men I've minded, lines of dialogue I trapped in a lined-paper notebook and never though I'd let out. It's going, but it's going slowly, unevenly. With poetry I do the drafting, the scraping together of lines and images and breaks, measure out my punctuation and sift through it for the best ones. With fiction I feel exposed, ugly, writing a character walking across a movie theatre foyer takes me all day and even then I don't like the way he sees the line of people waiting for tickets.
   


3. I turned 24 on Sunday. Messages from two people made me feel something unexpected, a window cracking open just a little, or something not quite so trite. I began to miss them, I think, to begin the process of missing and wanting. Or maybe it's just the attention, a low-level craving which will go away when I realise that I'm too much of a chicken to ever be the one who makes plans.
   


4. Above and beyond everything else I'm waiting for my dissertation marks, confirmation of my overall grades.
   


5. I'm waiting to be done, to do the next thing.