Dear Writer

Dear writer, I am your reader, I have sorted your stories and I want you to take me to places where I have never been. You may have told these tales many times before. You must have watched wonder pry eyes wide open on your listener’s faces. But as I sit here, I wish to be transported to the scenery, the scenario, the sense of who lives in your thoughts.

Reading glasses on table, legs elevated, lap blanket snug and a cup of cocoa. Ready! I want to smell the flowers, the sewers, the ordinary meal, all. I want to hear the mouse chewing the trailer’s skirts, the child whimpering in his sleep, the traffic in the distance. It’s all in the detail, the minute mundane moment. It lives in the voices, the intonations that presage the deed. The story that you have planted grows and expands into its surroundings.

I want to feel the fear, to anticipate the next blow to the being which you have brought into my consciousness. As I shrink in my skin when words yank at the center of emotion, you hold my plexus in your pen; you can’t tell me what to comprehend, but you have the power to stir, to awaken dormant cells with mere phrases.

Educate me; let me learn the ways of this life or that person, this creature beyond myself. Enlarge the scope, I am eyes, I am ears. Every sense is alert, waiting to be enriched during this time which I devote to one book, one paragraph to receive your message on this page. I am at one with the written word, warm and grateful. For the library.