$24.00

Today, I received $24.00.

$24.00 – a week’s worth of work. The first return on my college education. 

$24.00, for something I have no claim to. 

For something I can only hope to run in to sometime, years from now, under the dim lights of the fiction section in some crowded bookstore – the carpet, sleeping toddlers and coffee stains. And it’ll catch my eye like a forgotten lover, and I’ll smile to myself and look away – remembering the raw passion of an earlier version. One not yet scarred by years of rewrites and rejection. One still drenched with promise. And when I get to the parking lot, I’ll find it hazy with tears. Echoing with laughter. Pride.

So I’ve printed the invoice, and I’m buying a frame for it with the money I’ve made. I’ll nail it to the wall above my diploma, and it will be a reminder. A promise. An explanation for anyone who still needs one – though, in my experience, they still won’t understand. They’ll see it as lacking, and ask what it was worth. And they’ll mean back then. In the beginning. And they’ll ask – Is it valuable? 

And gone are the hundreds of stories that died in their tracks. The thousands of lines of disjointed poetry. The bar-room napkins and scraps of loose-leaf paper that explode from desk drawers. Kitchen counters. Jacket pockets. Gone, the hours of painful labor leading up to a bloody rebirth. The nights of drunken laughter spent learning conversation. The days of suffocating silence, when something so easy became so fucking hard. 

That first breath. The meditation on each one that follows.

$24.00. 

For a few scraps of useless paper. 

For the chance to see the clock spinning in the right direction, maybe for the first time in my life.