When I was in high school, what seems like 100 years ago, I wrote a short story called "And Then There Was Nothing..." The "moral" of this horrifying little gem was that those who strive for perfection end up with nothing at all. The plot involved two overachieving high school students trying to do well in Chemistry accidentally inventing something that blows up the world. As was my typical style at that time, the characters were based on students I knew and particularly despised for their perfectionist tendancies.

I was 14. Give me a break.

Anyway, for some reason I'm thinking about that story today.

I am not a child. And yet I am someone's child, and I know things a child should not know.

I know that my father is drinking himself to death. I know that he is impotent, and that he shits in his pants and pisses in his bed. I know that my stepmother eventually left him not because he hit her, but because he told her he'd rather die on a barstool than live with her. I know that his liver was nothing more than a little crusty ball of carbon 15 years ago. I don't know what it looks like now, but I can imagine.

I know that my grandfather was imprisoned not once, but twice, for molesting children, and that my father and stepmother let me play with him anyway, let me sleep in his house, let me sit on his lap. And I know that my sister was relieved when he died, as finally she could keep her own children away from him without making a fuss. God forbid anyone make a fuss.

I know that my father told my mother to get an abortion, and that she had an appointment and intended to keep it right up until the morning she was supposed to go in. I know she wondered for years if she made the right choice.

I know that my aunt's husband beat her. I know that my cousin is a drug addict, and that her husband is stupid, and that her baby has little chance of any sort of better life. I know that there is a cycle of poverty and humiliation crushing my people, and that distancing myself from them may not be the only way out of it, but it's the easiest.

I know that just because my family is better than some, that doesn't make everything that happened OK.

I am 25, and I know things a child should never have to know.

The woman in my passport photo is not smiling. She's wearing a sleeveless white shirt and dangly silver earrings. She has a blemish on the right side of her lower lip. She has a look about her that could pass for ardor at a glance, but is likely just sweat. She's so young. Calculating the dates makes her 26. She seems younger to me.

I know, because I remember, that she wasn't planning a trip to anywhere specific on the August morning when she stood in line at the post office, filled out the forms, and had that picture taken. She was old enough to navigate the bureaucracy and pay the fees, old enough to think about obtaining a passport, but young enough to take pleasure in doing so, even without a trip planned. She was in that in-between state of embryonic adulthood. She had the outside trappings of being an adult--a steady job, a mortgage--but she wasn't all the way there on the inside yet. Adolescence lasts longer than we think.

I could say I barely know her now, with her silly earrings and her expectations all over her face. But the truth is I do know her. She's been here all the time. She emerges with every trip to somewhere new, while making reservations or in the security line at the airport or when the plane touches down on new land. And even if I don't remember the feeling she got standing in that hot university post office, posing for that terrible picture, she does.

At about 9pm last night, I looked around at my companions and found that I must be very boring company indeed.

Were it not for Leo, I may have gotten lonely.

For the last few years, I've participated in National Blog Posting Month. Though it's moved to an every-month thing now, it used to be an annual event that took place in November. It was created, I believe, in response to National Novel Writing Month. NaBloPoMo is pretty simple: blog every day. NaNoWriMo is a bit more complicated (but just a bit). The rules are:

1. Write a 50,000-word (or longer!) novel, between November 1 and November 30.


2. Start from scratch. None of your own previously written prose can be included in your NaNoWriMo draft (though outlines, character sketches, and research are all fine, as are citations from other people's works).


3. Write a novel. We define a novel as a lengthy work of fiction. If you consider the book you're writing a novel, we consider it a novel too!


4. Be the sole author of your novel. Apart from those citations mentioned two bullet-points up.


5. Write more than one word repeated 50,000 times.


6. Upload your novel for word-count validation to our site between November 25 and November 30.

You know where this is going, right? I've been writing. In the last month, I've written more than 50,000 words (though I wouldn't call the result a novel). So, this month, no NaBloPoMo. I'm going in. I'm going to try to write a novel.

I won't be posting it her. I don't have any illusions about it being good. But it's something I've wanted to do for years and thought was beyond me. I know now that it's not.

(Note: This is a piece of fiction, based on this week's challenge over at Write-of-Passage. The challenge is: "Find a person in public today and study their character. Make a story surrounding them. Build them in to your shorty essay.")

I am so sick of these damn dogs. I never wanted dogs. I don't like them. They smell, they bark, they can't use toilets. I especially don't like big, hairy, black ones. But they, like most of the things I don't like in my life, came with Kevin. Now Kevin's gone, and I'm still walking these dogs, every day, around and around the block. I wait as long as they'll let me and then I put them on their stupid leashes and walk them in circles.

Kevin's insistence that I'd grow to love his dogs should have tipped me off before anything else did that things with him would go bad. When I say I don't like something, I am not just doing it to hear my own voice. He could have insisted on keeping the dogs without demanding that I "warm up to them." I'd probably have resented them less if he had. But instead, he was so sure that I'd grow to "think of them as my children." No. I wanted children, once. My children would have, eventually, learned to wipe their own chins and asses. Unlike Kevin, though, I don't insist that I know better than someone else what he or she likes. When he said he didn't like children, I believed him.

The dogs were just puppies when I met Kevin. Brother and sister, he said, though I don't think they're smart enough to know what family is. He got them from someone with a box in a grocery store parking lot. He called them "mostly Lab," but they're really just big, hairy mutts. They were a year old when we started living together. I wanted him to move in to my apartment in the city. It was a beautiful, old apartment on a great street. It was close to everything--work, shopping, restaurants. But it wasn't a good place for the dogs, or for his bikes, or his tools. So I moved in with him, in this suburb, where all the streets looks the same and I still get lost after all these years.

Kevin knew every inch of this development. He knew which roads went through, which were dead ends, which led to parks and trials. He even knew which houses put up the best Halloween decorations and Christmas lights. He used to walk the dogs by a different route every day. He said it kept life interesting for them, that they could smell new things and mark new territory with each day's walk. He drove to work by the same route every day, every day had the same breakfast, every summer took the same vacation, even got me the same birthday present three years in a row, but he was very concerned with breaking up the monotony for his dogs. Now, I walk the dogs around the block, always north-to-south, for exactly thirty minutes (which is seven times around). They still sniff and pee, still pull on their leashes when they see a squirrel. I don't think they know the difference.

Kevin's been gone a year now. When his sister came for his memorial service, she said the dogs he loved so much must be a great comfort to me. I almost laughed in her face. Which part, I wondered, was supposed to be comforting? The gross, wet noses pushing against the backs of my legs? The constant muddy floor from their paws? The vet bills that were now mine to handle alone? Maybe it was the walking that was supposed to comfort me, the leashing up Kevin's dogs and walking them around Kevin's neighborhood, without Kevin. Or maybe it was watching them age, their black muzzles growing steadily grayer, the fatter of the two developing a bit of a limp. Maybe I was supposed to be comforted by watching them die, just like I'd watched Kevin die.

I know I don't have to stay here. I could sell this house, give the dogs to the pound, get rid of the bikes and tools. I could move back to an apartment in the city--maybe not one as nice as before, but one similar. I could shrug off all the things that Kevin left me with that I never would have chosen on my own. I could lose the suburban weight I've put on, get some stylish clothes, try again. I could call this whole creating a family experiment a loss and start over. But I won't. I'll keep having the lawn cut every second weekend, and stringing up white icicle lights the first weekend in December. I'll keep buying the same soap, the same coffee, stopping for gas at the same station. I'll keep walking these dogs, who I can't stand, in circles around this block. I'll keep waiting for him to come back.