When my family moved to Alabama I went through all my posessions as I do once a year, eliminating the junk and minimizing my childhood relics down to the bare essentials. For the first time, I went through my ‘childhood box’, filled with all my important school projects from preschool to fifth grade.

I was amazed at how many art projects and little stories I had created, and how many I remembered making. The black construction paper overlaid with glue to make spider webs still smelled the exact same. The texture of finger paint on paper plates was as familiar as if I’d only touched it a moment ago. Going through all of this and reading teacher comments and my own words, it became apparent I was a story-teller from the very beginning, though I was not aware of this fact until later.

I didn’t want to be a writer until I was in fourth grade. Before that time, I wanted to be an astronaut, as that was the only way I could ever truly fly. I wanted to fly, not drive an airplane, and not fall from the sky. I wanted to hover in the air, weightless. Astronauts were the only people who could do that, so that was what I wanted to be.

Growing up, I discovered being an astronaut meant a lot of schooling in my two most hated subjects: Math and Science (don’t worry, I grew out of it). An insatiable reader, I realized I wanted to make stories more than I wanted to study math and science for forever, and I eventually settled down to what everyone else knew was inevitable.

It is the in-between period that I discuss in this poem, the time when I have decided that I’m going to become a writer but no one particularly takes me seriously. I was learning to be what I am now, and it took thousands of hours of careful study. The topics were reading and scribbling. I journaled constantly when I could free my hand up from the book I was reading. I remember just as much fantasy and fiction from my childhood as I do actual events. During those years before I wrote my first novel, when I was still in the process of becoming a writer, instead of being one, no one knew what I was up to. I’m not sure anyone suspected what I was turning into, not even me.

The premise for this poem was inspired by the book Rant, by Chuck Palahniuk, one of my all-time favorites. If I could go back in time, I would watch myself grow into the person I have become, and see if I could pinpoint the moment where I could declare myself a writer.

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