My earliest memory is of the hippos at the Oklahoma Zoo. My mother told me not to get too close to the edge, because a boy once fell in and was swallowed up in one of those big gray mouths.
I didn't know what it was like to die, but I knew what it meant to be a something, and then a nothing at all.
The first time I read a book, it was like a light had been ignited inside of me. It was all-consuming, a new kind of air. I knew from a very young age that I wanted to write books. I always wanted to be on fire, to chase an epiphany every day of my life, and being a writer was the closest way I knew how to do that.
I went to college to become an English major, but I dropped out because I thought it was romantic, and I imagined myself riding trains like Kerouac and dipping inspiration out of stars. Instead I stayed at my grandparents dairy farm for six months, writing in the basement. I moved to Austin with an anarchist boy and we stayed in a punk house with a haunted blues band, burners, and heroin addicts. I wrote articles on the Internet for $15 and in the fall, I worked at a haunted house as a deformed incest child.
One day he went back home, and I applied for a job as a video game tester at a local gaming company. I got the job, and for the next 9 months I tested Sims 3: Pets for Edge of Reality.
Later, I met a woman I called the demon, and I took her with me when I got a job as a game designer in Seattle. Shortly before that, I published my first book, a dystopian horror, The Crooked God Machine, on Amazon. Three years later I published We are Wormwood.
I wasn't happy in Seattle - despite drinking and partying most nights, modeling on rooftops, and having multiple boyfriends and girlfriends. I was thinning. I took a joy in not eating, and drinking vodka at 3 A.M on street corners. I took adderall and benzos everyday and thrilled in my sickness. I thought I was going to kill myself. I stopped writing. I'd lost myself.
I ended up moving back to Austin, and Fungasm, an imprint of Eraserhead, picked up my defunct short story collection and republished it. I worked for a little big as a mobile game designer, and began work on my third novel, The Edgar Allan Poe Simulator. We adopted three dogs. I took a lot of acid, hiked a lot in the park, and began working on curing my PTSD. Slowly the joy I'd drained from my life came back to me.
I called that little strain of hope inside me the glowing seed. And for years I clutched it between frozen fingers, terrified its light would go out. But now, I could feel it taking root. Growing inside of me, shifting the cracked parts of me that for years threatened to extinguish me.
Some days I thought maybe I didn't want to be a writer anymore. It'd been nearly three years since Seattle. My spiritual ground zero. Maybe I should be a taxidermist, or collect quartz crystals, or become a dog trainer.
But at night when I can't sleep, when I think I've given up forever, the desire grips my throat again.
And I turn back to the page. To write.
I returned to community college - with the support of my boyfriend - but he got a job in sunny California. So here I am, currently sitting in a hotel room, writing on steemit, working on my next book. Drinking coconut coffee from Trader Joes. Trying to learn how to be human again.
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