I like to think that I know things. I read and think and write, and so I think I know things. And then at the end of it, or the middle of it, or before it even started. I don’t even know what I am doing, let alone who I am or anything else.

I read others with a hyper-critical eye, noting what should have been edited or elaborated, highly judgmental of narrative structure or character development, whatever it might be, something not quite there, or maybe too perfectly so, that I, yes me, would have done better.

I think as I sit on the fire escape, or at least think that I do, cigarette and scotch in hand, and message myself revelations that are repetitively vacuous or vacuously repetitive, one or the other, but seem an absolute at the time. And so I write those down and put them in some kind of order resembling something or other. I do all of that, over and over again, and finally send some of that to an editor not to be edited but just to get a contact and get published and instead get this feedback on page one.

And that’s when I think that I don’t know what I thought I did or even know that I didn’t know anything to start, that it’s a charade, because even if I do the edits – and I will – I won’t know what it is anymore because I’m just doing it to get published and I’ve lost sight of the thing that made me push off into the unknown in the first place or something like that, something that I should text myself or delete or not even have bothered to have thought of at all.