I'm still bad at titles.

I wonder when I stopped writing.

I found a slew of notebooks and loose leaf papers, all covered with my adolescent script, all stories and ideas and character sketches. Some are ridiculously lame. Some are quite cute. Some I could re-work now, if I am still a writer.

I emulated the young adult books I read, from happy teenage friends echoing Jessica and Elizabeth Wakefield of Sweet Valley to poor, dumb co-eds being chased by malevolent nobodies, a la R.L. Stine. I wrote out entire stories based on my own fantasies about my various crushes: in one story, CJ (someone I'd actually forgotten I had a crush on) and I get stranded with some of our friends in some magical land of stone and water. In another, I actually go out with CJ for a year. In yet another, my best friend dares me to walk up to my epic middle-school crush, Shawn, and kiss him. Sometimes I would rewrite the stories and give all the characters different names. To protect the innocent.

Maybe I stopped writing when I came to Lancaster and died for a little while. I have some incredibly bleak and unfortunately trite poetry from winter of my freshman year, and after that I have serious journal entries. I stopped fictionalizing my own life and stuck to the basics in a blue binder.

I kind of wish I'd channeled all my high school unhappiness into stories. Continued writing out my fantasies in dialogue and description.

I wonder why I am not that kind of a writer anymore. I wonder why it's not the way I pass my free time. I wonder why I can think and dream and observe and not get it down on paper the way I see it.

I wonder how much of who we are when we are children remains once we are not.