I don’t know how to begin writing fiction, so . . . I’m not. I’m leaving the beginnings up to better, more experienced authors, and branching off — from whatever I wind up underlining, dog-earring, generally wanting more of.

Currently reading: No One Belongs Here More Than You by Miranda July.

I hated my job, but I liked that I could do it. I had once believed in a precious inner self, but now I didn’t. I had thought that I was fragile, but I wasn’t. It was like suddenly being good at sports.

They say that it doesn’t happen this way, but I know some girls that it happened to, and it’s true: you can just wake up one morning and have breasts. Not huge, porn-y boobs, but a nice, tasteful rack, big enough to catch everyone’s eye. Breasts that get in the way when you reach for things, breasts that make old t-shirts look fantastic, breasts that get thought about hours after they leave the room: it happened to my friend Stacey. She said it was so unexpected that she didn’t even notice them until she tried to zip into a dress that morning, and even then, she just thought she was a little bloated or something. Like big boobs weren’t a plausible explanation. They weren’t even in her mind. But later that day, all these guys whistled at her in the hallways between classes, and she looked down and was like, wait, whoa, what? Bam. These things happen, people.

And, not incidentally, this was exactly how something else happened to me.

I woke up one morning and the change had occurred.

Immediately beautiful, swanning, blossoming into a woman —

Nope.

I don’t know how to begin writing fiction, so . . . I’m not. I’m leaving the beginnings up to better, more experienced authors, and branching off — from whatever I wind up underlining, dog-earring, generally wanting more of.

Currently reading: Sea Change by Jorie Graham.

Everything unpreventable and excited like / mornings in the unknown future. Who shall repair this now. And how the future / takes shape / too quickly.

I am densely packed in the middle, my edges scattered, nebulous: not unlike the Sun itself. I was enjoying a lemonade on the porch swing when it occurred to me that you might come along. Forces are strong here, our repulsions overcome.

“Are you busy?” you asked. “I brought old copies of People.”

You arranged your electron cloud like a hoop skirt, orbiting electrons rustling on the swing next to me. The planks creaked under our combined weight. A familiar sound, once: our weight, resting together. When our valence shells briefly converged, you said “sorry” — quickly.

“It’s all right.”

White plasma churned and whorled.

“So,” you said. “How have you been? Have things been much different, here?”

I wanted to tell you everything, like they never do in French films: that when you left I slept for days, weeks, months, depleted and shook-up. That I gathered a new identity. That we had unknowingly witnessed the beginning of life itself. That I don’t even know how I wound up here, in the center of the solar system swinging on a gravitational arm around the galaxy, but yet I could predict that I would be here again, this exact position, 250 million years from now.

“It moves faster in the middle than it does at the poles,” I said. “It makes me a little giddy.”

You scoffed, perhaps bored already. “Does it.”

“Yes.”

“You always did like a good ride.”

White plasma churned and whorled.

“I’m sorry,” you said, flipping open a magazine. “Too soon? Let’s take a look at Katie Holmes’ wedding dress.”