I'm a writer. I don't believe in privacy. This is mostly true. I'll share just about anything if I think it will make a good story, and as some of my favorite stories are of the dangerous and dirty and little human kind, and my life is so very, very mundane, I'll end up confessing everything eventually. A fictional mouth isn't even always necessary, though sometimes, I need two. But, I am at heart a consummate sharer. I can't not. I remember reading as a girl that Libras are particularly good at keeping secrets, and while that may be true for yours, it's never, ever true for mine.

I am a woman of my time, though, and relish, too, controlling the flow of information from me to you. I want to tell when I'm ready to tell. I want time enough to find the best way to say it. So it's entirely possible I have things from my eighth year I might be crafting still for a reveal in my eightieth. Online and on the page I can spill the beans in as careful a pattern as a like, a mess that arranges itself into a silhouette of shame or regret or artless lust, so much prettier than the snotty, pajama-clad mess that holds the pen or punches ragged-nailed fingers against sticky keys. I think you'll like her better. I know I do.

You know what else I like? Little intimacies. Like my husband's hand on my belly when he imagines I am sleeping, when my arrested breath alerts him to the fact that I am not and it's all the change that either of us can feel in my slowly-growing-strange body. I like writing it. It's like we're all closer together. You and me and baby makes three, thirty, a thousand dreams.