Winter is convenient because the cold helps keep the kitchen fruit from getting too ripe. The space heater is on full blast. The orange fluorescent glow looks warm, at least. It makes you feel sort of like you're in a big toaster oven. You reach for your tea. Your fingers appear from inside your hoodie sleeve. Like a turtle's head, your hand pops out, snaps at the mug, and goes back in its shell. Don't let the sunny Oakland weather fool you--it's freezing up in this piece! You and your roommate huddle in the kitchen upstairs, where the heat has convened. You've taken your last tokes of the OH-SIX, and now everything looks, sounds, tastes EPIC. Nas' Hip Hop Is Dead is blaring from the speakers, pushing you sideways. Ever since you copped it the day it came out, it's been a regular in the rotation.

Old hustlers, reminscing on better days
They home, doing nothing, might as well be in a cage
Hating on young brothers, one foot in the grave
They used to love us till we found our own way through the maze

It seems Plath and Esco are crushing grapes on the outskirts of your consciousness. Odd couple. How fitting to end the year with no urgent obligation but the jitteriness in your fingertips to make words. It's about fucking time! Writer's block is like the annoying ex-classmate that you weren't really friends with but he says you were his best friend. And he keeps wanting to hang out with you, but you can only divert him to come back later, and there's no way to get rid of him because he accidentally saved your life when you were 13. But it's okay for now.

You remember last night, you were feeling extra alone. Found yourself vying for love you have no rights to. In the early evening the translucent blue of the sky washed your burgundy loft walls maroon. Morose maroon. Boo-hoo. You felt disgusting, regretted each second as it twittered through the door. You exhaled the walls in purple breath and reached for your new notebook. You wanted to write. About that. About boo-hoo stuff. You let your pen drag as it's been too habitually. You know that when your handwriting is good, it's because you're not excited about your writing enough to write fast.

All of a sudden, a jerk, a twitch, a tap. It begins in the back of your head, right beneath that center where your hair grows swirly and gave you cowlicks when you were 5. It spreads like a skully, over your scalp, past your forehead and engulfing your eyes. It drips past your sinuses and into your esophagus. It free falls into the reservoir of your heart and invades your system. Your foot won't stop tapping. Your head won't stop nodding. Your grip makes your pen sweat, slashing nearly illegible hieroglyphics on the paper. Your W's look like N's, your S's look like C's, and you're aware of it while you assemble your letters along the lines of the page. You imagine a century down the line, when scholars are trying to translate your journals. They're old white guys in gray and orange beards and dressed like Sherlock Holmes. Wondering if they should change your cuz's to because's, your shit's to horse crumpet's. But no time for that now. You could fall through this cloud very easily. Every time you complete a line, you read through all the lines preceding, with the new one tucked in its new home ready to be tested. You jump out of your seat, pace back and forth in front of your desk in a determined synchronization. You don't like straightening words once they're mounted. You recite your last line until the next plops out your tongue naturally. Then you record it. The closer the writing is to the realtime it would take to say it, the better. That's why you don't mind the lazy lettering. You love approaching openings you've made for yourself to invent punchlines, or puns, or dry sarcasm. It's what keeps you writing, among all of the artistic endeavors you've dipped your toe into. These openings, you discover them like treasures in Zelda. Conversations with beady-eyed characters, you become addicted to this quest whose spoils are still shrouded in digital mystery but it doesn't seem to matter. But once you're in it, it's pretty much for good. Those who are able to ween themselves off look back with conflicted contempt. Looks back at this writer's universe like, "Yeah, I used to do that shit. Had to move on to bigger things though, nah'mean?" For a split second you make eye contact, and the curve of their eyebrows tell you everything. That you can never truly move on, that even if you ever call it quits you still fiend for the metallic smell of the microphone, the nakedness of being in front of a sea of people with your cut-and-paste poster of letters. I hope you like it. You wonder if you'll ever be like that.

Not yet though, not quite yet. You've got a great idea and don't think it's one of those ones that will stale overnight. You laugh at yourself, clutch your face with your thumb and ring finger connecting your temples. You imagine the ideal audience reaction, test the wit in your head repeatedly to measure if the reference is too obscure, if the jab is timed correctly. You have to finish this poem tonight, at least the skeleton of it. You're not very good at returning to stories when you get distracted and leave the characters alone in the forest and with nowhere to go. What makes the writing fun? It's difficult to break it down. Picked apart, it is difficult to impress. It's not specifically the soreness of your wrist mid-session, or flipping though the Microsoft thesaurus for more elaborate words than "better," or deciding if you want to use commas in this poem. It's the wholeness of watching the mosaic materialize, the back-and-forth motion of tweaking sentences and studying the stability of the structure. It's the curiosity of the morning after a drunken night, when you were drunk but not too drunk, but not much is remembered besides mental Polaroids of colors, shadows, laughter. You know you had fun, and walking down the rain-soaked streets the road was blacker than the blacks you were used to, and the moon was full even though that wasn't the phase it was supposed to be in, and anything bad at all would be above anything else a breach in your good time. And reflecting on that grand night before, you know that your memories might fade, the remainders bronzed in romanticism, but at least you have this piece of writing. Even if you've done it a countless amount of times and each time you're too distracted writing to make an account of how it's done. Whatever you're doodling in that notebook is far more important than figuring out exactly what it is that gives you that fuel, and fire to write for hours without needing to eat or excrete, like for that elevated period you and language are each other's sufficiaries (there's no such word as sufficiary but I needed a word for something that "plays the role of one that is sufficient," so there, I just made it up).

And then you look at all you've written during this state of hypnotism, and scan it panoramic like a field. You know the next time it happens, you'll come across a point where you're stuck, and you'll flip back to this, the last good thing you wrote, and study it like an artifact left by a past generation of you. You hope that maybe, somewhere between the letters, you were slick enough to leave a clue, a couple of sentences to remind yourself of how you got to that point. But like always, you did not. The current you is the oldest, more senior you than all the yous of the past, and the yous in the future aren't as swag and youthful, so you wrote, and always will write selfishly, without much regard to keeping the fire steady, working that orange light to the ground so you don't have to refuel just yet.