I don't have a job yet, but the exciting news is that I started attending a free creative writing class, so I am writing again, I mean really writing, and feeling alive again, I mean really alive. I want to share a piece I wrote in a free-write exercise tonight. The prompts were "I believe," and "I didn't expect that to happen." I sort of did a stream-of-consciousness thing, and I like it. Here it is:

Here I sit, facing a green wall in the basement of the library. What color green I cannot even name. Maybe it's somewhere between a lime and a sea green? Or spring green on a cloudy day. Yeah, that's it. Spring green on a cloudy day. I did sort of expect something different than another prompt exercise, something more off-color, as is this green wall. But here I sit, facing the same wall for an hour and fifteen minutes. If Stella and Katie and Percy all stood against the wall, they'd each be half camouflaged according to the greens of their clothes: one top and two bottoms.
I bite hard into a pretzel, the crunch reverberates in my head, in the quietness of scribbling pens on paper. Pens on paper, that's what I like to hear. It's why I suck on my pretzel rather than chew.
Why is this so hard to write what I believe? I believe in this: writing. Writing and nothing else. No, that's not true. I believe in love, in magic, and, quite naively, in the goodness of people. I believe in Mother Earth, in music, in poetry. I believe in life, most days. I am here today, and I believe, no, I know it is because of writing.
I write to process; I write to know; I write to show; I write to tell. I write because I can, because I have a voice, and because I believe in that voice, my voice, and in the right to express it, shout it if I want to, or, more politely, write it in my journal.
How many lives now have been lost so I can have my polite and civil freedom to write my voice? How many young voices squandered, parched and lost in the desert? Dried up tongues in sand so the rest of the free world can thirst and thrive on oil. Oh, Christ! I don't want this, I don't want to go there now. I still want to believe the world is good. I want to believe in fairies and angels and peace. In the power of my son's laughter and in the protection of my love. But Cindy Sheehan knows, love is not enough. Love is not enough unless it has a voice. And voice is not enough unless you use it. And you can only use it if silent people fight terrorists and spy on our library cards, all to insure our freedoms and civil liberties. You know, the ones that make this country so great. The country that gives us each a voice in our votes (granted it took women and minorities almost two hundred years to have voices and votes, but you know, uh, what would our President say?). But we do have a voice, one voice, one vote, right? We do have a right, a vote, a voice. Right? Write?