Unstellar

A shitty first draft, just for you

Happy leap day! I hope y’all are doing well. I’m bopping in quick with a newish shitty first draft for you, thanks to a recent WWKC prompt. I’d love to know your thoughts!

Unstellar

I always knew 
I was destined for greatness. 
I submitted a story to Random House 
when I was ten years old, wrote my first song 
at twelve, decided to be a painter when I was fourteen, 
changed my mind at sixteen to be a performance pianist. 
At seventeen I read one book about the human brain and
resolved to be a neuroscientist. My first year of college
reminded me that I had never been very good at science, 
so I switched majors and became a journalist at twenty-one, 
then stalled out for a few miserable years before realizing 
at twenty-seven that my true calling was social work. 
A masters degree later, I found out at thirty that I was 
actually a yoga teacher. When that wasn’t it either, 
I came back home to writing at thirty-three and 
published my first book at thirty-four.

Now, at thirty-five, being a star no longer interests me. 
I want to be moss, slow and green and anchored. 
I want to be a rock skipping across the mirrored
surface of a pond, the ripples that reverberate
before fading into stillness. I want to be
the goose honking overhead, screaming 
that this moment is all that matters. 
I want to close my eyes and drop 
into the quietest part of me and
remember that this is who 
I really am: no one special. 
That’s all I want to be. 
Just a being, 
being.