The Essay

I turned this in three weeks ago. Professor Alderman read it, handed it back, and said, quietly, like she didn't want to make a thing of it, that I should keep writing the real stuff. I nodded and walked to my car and sat there for a minute.

The thing is, I recognized the essay when she said that. Not because it was good. Because it was already on my hard drive, in a document I'd titled 'not for the blog.' I'd written it there first. Then I cleaned it up, changed two sentences, and submitted it for a grade. And apparently that draft, the one I was most sure was too interior, too nothing, too much like thinking out loud, was the real stuff.

I've been sitting on whether to post it here since the semester ended. I kept waiting to write a little intro. Something to frame it, soften it, explain what it is. But every time I tried, the intro got longer than the essay, which is its own kind of answer.

So here it is, below, the way I turned it in. No epigraph. No disclaimer. The Hartwells has been a lot of things since I started it in 2007, a running log, a life update, a place to figure out what I thought about things. I don't think it needs a new definition. I think it just needed me to stop treating certain drafts as too private to count.

reading it back after hitting publish

That's it. That's the whole update. Happy almost-December.

the necklace always ends up in the frame somehow