I went and got a mocha from the Batdorf and Bronson. As I waited, I watched the barista with the gauge-less earlobes, creeped out by how the skin just hung down. Saggy and empty. The ice cream truck melody resounded painfully in my head, “do your ears hang low…” and I made myself look away.

The barista asked how I was doing, the way most students ask that question. In-between bored and polite. Like they already know I’ll reply with “Pretty good,” but ask because they’d be more bored if they didn’t interact with customers.

His forearms were littered with tattoos, unidentifiable to me. I paused when I noticed the narrow cast of his face. The cheekbones and sunken eyes reminded me, quite abrasively as I stood waiting, of a friend’s stepbrother. The last time I heard of Jeremy, he was being transferred to San Quintin for a robbery gone wrong. The numb nut was so drugged out of his drug-fried skull, he accidentally shot his friend in the foot. Not to do this harmless barista the disservice of a comparison with Jeremy in any other way aside from the shape of his face. Strange the way we can see other people in strangers sometimes.

With a clang, the barista’s expression contorted into a comic rendering of Edvard Munch’s “The Scream”. He’d burned his hand on the expresso machine and was subsequently trying to wag the pain from his fingers. He glanced up, and I pretended I didn’t see and fixated on a floor tile until my order was called.

I’ve barely written anything this week. My mind has been occupied on other things. Project work and the project work I’m not doing and the project work I’m currently trying to do. I feel like a lousy baker who’s been provided with all the ingredients to make a pie and they’ve given me no instructions. I’ve read wonderful stories before, I’ve watched brilliant stories before. I know what they feel like and I’m anxious the work I create won’t feel that way.

The day passed in the basement of the library. The fire did its damage. Like a smoker’s house, the walls and the carpets still smell like smoke.

I did very little for four hours. Researching baby names from the 30s and 40s was depressing. I only ever read those names on the margins of black and white photos. All the people named Wilbur and Horace, Eunice and Glenda probably aren’t around anymore.

I found some names for a few characters, but I might change them later. I dunno. Somehow identifying characters made them feel more solid, but they’ve all moved further away from me. It’s like I know and understand them even less now that I’ve named them. They have a name and that means they have people who gave them that name, parents who chose that name because it meant something to them. And they grew up listening to that name being spoken to them and they have their own history and independence that not even I, the voice of God, have unearthed yet. I worry that I won’t do them justice in the translation from my mind to the page. Movers sometimes break things on the way, fragile things wrapped in bubblewrap and newspaper. What is it about the characters that I’m worried I’ll ruin? Their morals? Their habits or dispositions or personalities? I’m too tired. No words make sense.

There is a feeling I get while out in the woods. The kind of feeling you get when you think someone’s watching you. It feels wrong. You move around, trying to shake off their gaze. Remove it from your skin.

I find myself out on these trails in the woods by my house, and every so often I’ll glance out of my peripherals, expecting my eyes to catch something. As my suspicions grow, so do my responses. My neck starts to twitch like it wants me to turn around. To make sure I’m alone. Whenever I stop and look off into a treeline, studying the decay and growth of the forest, my mind plays a trick. It imagines for a split second, an animal. Yet, animal sounds too domestic, too kind of a word for the things I picture. ‘Beast’ fits the conjurings my mind falls prey to.

Sometimes they’re wolves, watching me from a distant ridge. I can see the bow of their heads when they slow their pace. Stalking you with long, keen faces. Watching you with eyes which make you think their intelligence rivals your own; that out there in the woods, they would win. Sometimes it’s a bear on the pathway behind me; lumbering with a body made of muscle and hunger. Once, it was a mountain lion, shoulder blades hunched up into its back as it crouches. I know that it’s not real, but I still like to imagine.

It started when I was a kid. Some kind of goofy scare tactic. I played the game with myself for the same reason people watch horror movies: a part of me liked being scared. When I was young, I would imagine these frightening things and amp myself up. The pulse in my neck would leap faster and faster like a plucked string seconds before I would finally turn around to call my own bluff. They were products of an overactive imagination and one too many trips to the natural history museum.

These fear-fueled fantasies were child’s play, akin to a dark hallway at a friend’s house you had to navigate on your way to the bathroom. But the basis of those imaginings have grown with me as I’ve aged. I still like poking at my fears. Writing is one of the mediums that allows me to do that, and thus the reason for taking this program.