We didn’t have phones or iPad covers to decorate. I’m not sure I even knew what graffiti was at the time.  If I had, I still wouldn’t have done it. The closest I ever wanted to get to the police department was walking past its corner location to get to the public library. But the need to be creative and declarative continued to hover all around. So I, we, took to the front of our spiral notebooks and two flap paper folders. We wrote down our BFFs and our future marriage names. We put hearts with arrows and who liked whom. We drew our school mascots and tic-tac-toe. Highlighted the years we would graduate, which seemed a lifetime away. (It’s funny how quickly that “lifetime” came and passed, but never the desire to create, become, and stop for a moment and say, this is who I can be, this is who I am. 

I mention it because I’m still doing it. With new stickers in hand, I cover my iPad. I place one on the front of The Paris Review, and I am as joyful as that seven year old scribbling of all that could be. Creating it with my own hands. 

Is it girlish to keep dreaming? I hope so. Childish? – with any luck, ever! I want to find joy in everything that is, and hope in everything that could be — claiming it all by heart and by sticker.