I find them all over, things I need to hold on to, words in clips and phrases, books by the dozen, pictures and songs. I can't help storing them, I can't help saving them as though I will one day make sense of them, recombine them as my own. This is what my life is like, blips and fragments of beauty, dangling bits of stimulus that spark all sorts of currents.

I can't help it.

On the shelf at home, I have a bowl full of plastic goodies. And an array of textured glass vases next to it, purchased over different occasions. A sketch book, full of humble attempts and self-portraits, erasers, 10 or so pencils with different tips; various stages of softness and points. Papers.

I need these things.

Piles of the papers: notebooks, cards. Scribbles and printings and torn out of magazines, words and words and words. Pictures from catalogs, clippings galore, happy people, healthy people, pensive, pretty.

You can call me a pack rat, I won't mind.

But I don't think that's what it is. I don't know what I plan on doing with them, but they appeal to something inside of me. These are the things that make me wish I could draw, wish I could sing, wish I could use photographs to capture emotion. Wish I knew about interior decorating and colors and evocative and the words, at least I can use them in some fashion, cutting and pasting, reworking them in my mind, the words.

This is my life. Ain't it pretty?

Log in or register to write something here or to contact authors.