Words are more important to me than I care to admit.

And right now my lungs are heavier than my head. My BFA is changing and so is my vocabulary. My arms are covered in layered ink and my walls are filling with graphite. I need to learn how to talk about my work differently, but emphasizing words makes it difficult to speak. In third grade, Royal Oak witnessed an immaculate snowfall, and I relied on words to remind me of that night. The stars and the snow glittered with light, and gravity was perfectly balanced. I wore a size one shoe and walked only in footprints, and everything made sense. But my mom found my paper that I tucked away, and showed my teacher my words. And my words became more permanent than those I write on my veins. And suddenly I found myself at the public library throughout the summer, talking about words, and reading books about writing, a term that I preferred to be mundane. Private lessons were ok, but I am an artist, and my words have no weight. But my veins became heavy and flowed with vowels, and consonants were scraped from under my nails. Like other things, I never wanted an official diagnosis. When I was fifteen, I made people cry, because my grandpa was dead and I wrote down words. And words that were secrets were found by my mom. And I was at my aunt's house, and my mom had my words, and she showed them to relatives, who took me aside. And they said some words that were heavier than mine and weighed me down while I drowned in their tears. Maybe that's why my grandpa always used white-out. I've been battling gravity my entire life. Is it fair for me to place value on permanence, when I wish my existence were more transient than that? I value the words of others, but at night, I wash my own down the shower drain.