The cursor of my text editor blinks inside the screen in front of me; comfortably it rocks steadily in and out of view, reminding me that the page is blank, that it hasn't moved since I sat down in front of my computer. I, for a mawkish moment, admire the endurance of this little bar and its insistence to blink. Black to white, there and back, in and out of existence as the metronome of my words.

This paper has nothing to do, nothing to do at all with leaves, or the silly way that they litter my life. I have nothing left to say and no more cunning ways to disguise the fact that I never had anything to say about leaves. The journey of a writer, however, inspires volumes in my mind and means everything to me. Without expression, after all, we have nothing. The thoughts we think often lead us to growing beyond those same thoughts, yet at times they lead us to contradiction; we run around in circles as we chase truth, beauty, pain, whatever it is we endeavor to wrestle to the floor and force onto paper. Thus is the crux of each writer's task: there are millions of words, thousands of styles and voices in which to speak, but developing the perfect way to articulate one's perception takes a lifetime. I don't understand what surrounds me, all I know is that it is beautiful. Greedily, quite greedily, I desire to capture it. Notes scribbled down on napkins, bits of writing on my hands, for some reason these scattered fragments lend me peace because they seem palpable. Words, however beautiful, will not define my reality- I wouldn't have it so, dear friend, for truth exists behind the thick fabric of our arrogant discernment- but they help me discover what I truly think and eventually help me to change my mind over and over again. A true irony, it is: writing about my exhausting confusion is what makes me happy.

I've probably started thirty journals in my lifetime. We're all guilty of this crime; we spend twenty dollars on a flashy product from Barnes and Noble, we justify the expense by reciting the importance of frequent writing in our minds as we finger the shiny cover, we promise to write. A week passes by and already the journal has joined the others, and it lives a nice, full life complacently collecting dust on the shelf as it wastes our space. I cannot express how tragic this is, I cannot impart how regretful we will find ourselves. Countless times I have looked back over my writing and found that my most trying times- those that would probably yield the most insight- have come and gone without a single snippet of thought. I let days, weeks, months pass by as I neglect the process that nourishes me. Let us be honest with ourselves: frequent writing is the only thing that separates a writer from an idiot holding a pen. Disciplining myself to write daily has proved to be excruciatingly difficult, and, during various spouts of time, completely hopeless. When I have succeeded in this arduous challenge, however, and have managed to write steadily for a certain period of time, I am always overwhelmed to remember that the raw process of writing never grows easy, and that the rabid slew of editing and revision that follows never grows thin. Our present ideas chase those of the previous sentence around, above and back again, and I hasten to paste them together and make sense of it all. I come to new conclusions and dismiss those of the past until it is time to rediscover the old and start the cycle over again.

The journey never feels like an ideal path that winds around green hills, but rather a high-school track with hurdles of steel and sharp drop offs that leave me thoroughly confounded. That's how it is meant to be, I suppose; that it is how it functions best. Our sentiments sit on the concrete floor in front of us like newspaper clippings, and I'm confident that a shard of rhyme and a sliver of reason will eventually float to the top.