Erica Lorraine Scheidt

You don__ look like anyone special at all,_ I tell him. And I curse him. And I start a club to hate him. And I make a magic spell to get rid of him.

It doesn't matter what story we're telling, we're telling the story of family.

I belong here, I tell Toy. I'm hungry for every city block. Every brick building. Every crowded intersection. Electric. I feel brand new.

I'm far from the world and I see it like a brightly lit ball in the distance. The sky behind it is mostly gray. It starts in silence, but I can see the people. Everyone is in a hurry. They're racing around the globe. They each hold a thread, like a bit of string, and it unravels, covering the planet. The buzzing starts. The buzzing gets faster and louder. They're all racing to one spot on the earth. I'm outside of it and I can see everything. I can see every person in the world racing to a single spot on the earth. The buzzing is all I can hear. It gets so I can't take it. Then I wake up.

I want to go back to the tell-me-again times when I slept in her bed and we were everything together. When I was everything to her. Everything she needed.

In the tell-me-again times, (_) when my mom and I lived in a little apartment in a little building downtown, I slept in her bed. It was a raft on the ocean, a cloud, a forest, a spaceship, a cocoon that we shared. I could stretch out like a five-pointed star and then she'd bundle me back up in her arms. I'd wake in the morning tangled in her hair.

It's hard, omigod remember? Being a kid.

And the stories we tell ourselves are not the only stories.

Toy is talking and this is why I love her. She can go on about herself ceaselessly and like the scratching of a branch against the window at night, the steady insistence of it is comforting. She has stories without beginnings, stories that trail off, stories that crisscross and contradict and dead end.Toy is the star of her stories. Events orbit her like a constellation.

The thing I've learned is that thinking is not writing.