My life bleeds from the pen in blood-red ink staining paper with great swathes of sorrow and towering pillars of joy. I live passionate in this life, laughing and crying, not knowing what lies before me, remembering what lies behind. I capture emotions with the lens of my mind and send them pounding through my veins to plant themselves in my heart where they fill me and inform me and identify me. When I take up pen and write, I liberate my emotions to take me, and shake me and drain me ‘til all that’s left is a sentimental memory of a time, a place, a love, a loss, a tear, a smile.

Joy is half of me, sorrow is half of me, continually emptied, continually refilled from a ream of life lived well, from an inkwell of life lived full. My pen writes of you when I write of me. Our stories are the same, the words the same, the ink the same. When you read my words, you read my life. Cry with me, laugh with me, as I do when I write of me, as I do when I write of you. When you read my words, you read your life. I am half of me, you are half of me, we flow from the same inkwell. Cry with me, laugh with me.