“The page is no place, today, for what is pulling at my heart. Notebooks get misplaced; they lie around; they flip open in the wind. Who might see these pages, read them? My heart is a secret place, especially now. The wide open plain of a page is a place with no boundaries, no etiquette, no conventions. How would I begin to lay the fervid, lumpy core of myself out there in the open where I myself could no longer shield my eyes from it? What might happen? It could bleed through, soak all the pages in the book, slop onto the floor, stain the carpet. It could make a mess so bad that no one could clean it up. I might still be there, scrubbing at the pentimento of its spillage, decades from now.”
—Enid Brock, in response to the prompt
