Katy: Confidence

I have driven a car on acid, carried my mother drunk upstairs and slept with numerous men and one woman to no consequence. I am comfortable in airports. There are things I don’t tell, small things of my own. I collect: snowball paperweights from all the cities I’ve been, buttons, books about birds. I am twenty-five years old and I only left home once and that was a long time ago.

I was, believe it or not, the librarian type. All I really loved to do was sleep. I couldn’t get enough of it. Nine, ten hours, and I’d wake up on my belly, lift my arm off the pillow and it would drag a sleeve of dream, green, sequiny, dripping.

That was when I lived a life of trying. I scrubbed floors for money, did homework, checking it over, staying in from the sun. Every step I took seemed dire. Doing things that might be good for me later. I learned things the hard way. I believed in it – the value of work, earning everything, nothing free.