Hello Internet. My name is Jackie.

I think we've met before, in different manifestations of our true selves. I was a green teenager who thought the world was a shining pearl cradled in her little hands. You were a spectacularly evil black hole of time that enabled me to poke my friends from long distance. Or maybe, when I was a confused child, you were a cesspool of spambots and trolls with the power to irritate normal users in real time (it was novel in those days). Merely to amuse myself, to satisfy my pursuit of information (no matter the quality), I would explore your dankest caverns and peaks of enlightened beauty.

Now, we meet in forms forged anew. An adult has moved into my head and attempted to take over, but the child lives on. And you seem more inviting than you were in the past; less like a labyrinth of the unknown or a chatty schizophrenic and more like an old friend who wants to hear what I have to say.

And, although I doubted it for some time, I suppose I do have a thing or two to say. The hard part is making myself sit down to write it all out.

Speaking of which, those stories won't write themselves. Except when they do.

are you

Are you drifting through fields of wheat,
dreaming past parking lots and skyscrapers
into night-forests of blooming stars?
Are you pondering the king who became a farmboy,

or the princess who slept at true love's kiss?

Are you wondering about the clouds,
the mind that moves the mouth that breathes them?
Are you wandering into lightning storms and gentle rain,
weathering the desert of lost hope?
And do you pause amidst it all
with my name soft upon your lips?