A picture’s worth a thousand words, but though my camera runs out of film quite frequently my words do not. I’m a visual person, the way words look on paper, clean and concise, is pleasing to my analytical eye and overactive mind. Writing has not always come naturally to me, it is not uncommon for me to lack the right words and find myself at a loss for ideas, but I love it. I want to write by pretending my pencil is a paintbrush, smoothing over my words like watercolor until their fluency can be appreciated by anyone with eyes. I want them to be so effortless that they flutter off the page right before the reader’s eyes like monarchs on their way to Mexico. It has been said that in order to a good writer it is absolutely necessary to be a good reader. I read everything: labels on orange juice cartons and spam email, movie credits and stickers on apples, picture captions and bathroom stall graffiti, expiration dates and book dedications. I think that often times those words overlooked are the most provoking; are their writers aware that they are destined to be ignored, cast under the radar to make way for the more “important” ones? What is the motivation behind good writing without the hope of someone reading it, relating to it, enjoying it? Seeing the words of others compels me to write, even challenges me, as I am a competitive person and this is my nature. Every day I retire to a tattered spiral-bound in an attempt to do better than the writers before me. There are times when words fly effortlessly from my pen like bright-breasted birds, and others when they linger idly on my page like gilded butterflies, beautiful only to the untrained eye. It’s easier to see than believe, and when my words don’t paint pristine pictures they fall flat on the page, nothing more than two-dimensional scribble between the lines. Writing is about feeling the words on your page, savoring them on the tip of your tongue, allowing them to shroud your vision and fill your lungs until you’ve saturated them with all the meaning that you have and hope to God that others feel it too. The very idea that people out there could read my writing, feel it and know it like I do, is incomprehensible, the same way I feel about the lack of boundaries in time or the number infinity.