Chastity Exercise

No adjectives, adverbs, nor dialogue. Only verbs, nouns, pronouns, and articles.

A child sits at her desk, peace enveloping her. She thinks this: the joy and comfort she’d feel snugging into an envelope then traveling the world swaying in a postman’s bag… Before her lies a stack a books: a personal journal, a story journal, two workbooks, and the book she’s reading for pleasure – which she’s read several times previously –The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien, which and who is her inspiration for art.

While she’d love to – and longs to – continue reading of Gandalf’s resuscitation of King Théoden, she’s been working on shifting her mindset, and dedicating herself to art, to her craft of writing – a call she can not deny another day. This peace she feels is a function of this embrace: the more she writes the more she feels like herself and the less anxiety and more confidence she has.

The sun has not yet risen, and she wonders what the day will bring. A mountain of ideas and fantasies pile up in her head. A wad, rather, not a mountain, for these delusions bleed into and cling to one another, each losing their identity until she cannot tell where one stops and the other begins.