The danger of words to a simple girl.

There's a maroon 1998 suburban out behind the barn. The one on Tally Ho Drive, way down a two lane highway west of Auburn. It's got those runners along the side of it, and a dozen scratches from dogwood branches and the back bumper is wrenched out to an awkward wave from the time I caught it on the side of the house. It's been sitting for three years now. It's the same four wheels I learned to drive on, pulling hard on the steering wheel to make doughnuts through the red clay. It's the same truck written into a story that still makes me tremble.

I was fifteen and words were a new and exhilarating tool. To write things I never dared speak, create stories and moments and sentences I blushed or swore at. The story, I named Plastic. And it's protagonist was a surly young woman, and she was running from something. And she drove that suburban through stop signs and lights and into parking lots behind bars. She left her lipstick in that suburban, and she felt her weight against the door when she slid out of it into a house that held a deathtrap. There was something sultry in the story, and something forbidden. A man with his hand brushing higher and higher on her thigh.

What humanity that I wrote these words and crafted sentences about a woman I had never seen, who experienced things I had never tasted. The story is raw and it brings red to my cheeks even today. I created a character and her steps more honestly than I'd dare to write today. She was sexual and deviant, and broken and weak, and resilient and beautiful.

What a strange thing, the freedom words bring. The terrifying and fulfilling rush when the un spoken is written and the unthinkable created.

To know I have books upon books left unwritten down in my belly and every new sentence is a step to writing the truest one.