Every Writer is at Least a Little Bit J. D. Salinger

                Just think about it. It’s true. We peer out at the world from our cabins, our hills, our heads, alone. The Great Drama plays on the stage before us, but we live and think and breathe in a separate space, away. We watch at frost-kissed windows (to the unknowing, “eyes”)  – close enough to fog them with our breath, but not close enough to smudge the glass with noses or cheeks. We pluck the images from where they splatter and smear on the other side and lay them neatly (or not so neatly) on scraps of paper. We mix them in brass bowls with words stewed in teapots or scraped from books or strained from blood, even from nothing. Sometimes we stray outside, as if in a dream. Sometimes we bring others back to visit. We are a little bit J. D. Salinger, not entirely J.D. Salinger, after all. (No offense, Mr. Salinger. Love the hermit thing.) But without fail, without thought, we return again to thought-worn floors, dream-spun rugs. This, more than any outward structure ever can be, is home. It begs the question, then: who was the first to look into a stranger’s eyes on those ventures out into the void only to see the familiar scribbled leaves rustling deep in another Sibyl’s cave? And then, who was first able to ask the question that would throw open the doors and windows forever: there are others?