فصل 21

VIOLET

138 days to go

Sunday night. My bedroom. I flip through our notebook, Finch’s and mine. I pick up the pen he gave me and find a blank page. Bookmarks and the Purina Tower aren’t official wanderings, but this doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be remembered too.

Stars in the sky, stars on the ground. It’s hard to tell where the sky ends and the earth begins. I feel the need to say something grand and poetic, but the only thing I come up with is “It’s lovely.”

He says, “ ‘Lovely’ is a lovely word that should be used more often.”

Then I get an idea. Over my desk, I’ve got this enormous bulletin board, and on it I’ve tacked black-and-white photographs of writers at work. I take these down and dig through my desk until I come up with a stack of brightly colored Post-its. On one of them, I write: lovely.

Half an hour later, I stand back and look at the board. It is covered in fragments—some are words or sentences that may or may not become story ideas. Others are lines I like from books. In the last column, I have a section for New Nameless Web Magazine. On three separate Post-its I’ve tacked beneath it: Lit. Love. Life. I’m not sure what these are supposed to be—categories or articles or just nice-sounding words.

Even though it isn’t much yet, I take a picture and send it to Finch. I write: Look what you’ve got me doing. Every half hour, I check for a response, but by the time I go to bed, I still haven’t heard from him.