I was a fine arts major in college, and a painter for many years. And I found that, like writing, art is very similar.

The poems are all wrong. It's a bang, a really big bang. Not a whimper. And sometimes gold can stay.

Wait, I got it. We, uh, won the battle and lost the war, or was it the other way around? 'Cause around here, it's hard to tell sometimes.

Because life goes on, L. The birds do their thing, and the bees do theirs. Seeds get scattered, and everything grows back.

It wasn't about how she looked, which was pretty, even though she was always wearing the wrong clothes and those beat-up sneakers. It wasn't about what she said in class--usually something no one else would've thought of, and if they had, something they wouldn't have dared to say. It wasn't that she was different from all the other girls at Jackson. That was obvious. It was that she made me realize how much I was just like the rest of them, even if I wanted to pretend I wasn't.

Was it really so far-fetched to think that words had a way of shaping a person's whole life?

It's crazy what you see if you aren't really looking.