The pencil, it turns out,
has never contained lead.
It’s always been graphite—
a form of solid carbon.
How much of what we think
we know is just a mistaken story
passed on for centuries?
And the human body, it turns out,
contains enough carbon
for 9,000 pencils—
that is a fact of the world,
a fact like the distance
from earth to the moon,
a fact like 99 percent of all human DNA
is the same. I’d like to think I will use up
my pencils, one every three days,
writing the story of what it is
to be alive here, to fall in love,
to disagree, to fail, to try again.
I want to write of healing,
write of the autumn air,
how it touches everything
with its cool transparency.
Write of how we are here
to revel in beauty, to find ourselves
in each other, to serve a story greater
than the one we know how to write,
serve the story that even now
is writing us.