I WAS SUPPOSED TO BE A FOREST RANGER.

At least according to my seventh-grade career aptitude test. 

And when you’re 13, you don’t question the career aptitude test. It was like a fortune teller, only more accurate and official because a Scantron sheet was involved.

I tried to prepare myself for a life full of khaki shorts and poison sumac, but I couldn’t quite get there.

Instead of keeping journals of yellow-breasted feathered things, I kept journals of poetry. Instead of day hikes, I had free writes. And instead of protecting our forests, I was slowly destroying them with my insatiable need for paper.

After a particularly nasty run-in with a magpie (full beak-to-skull contact, so many nightmares), I knew my heart wasn’t in the woods.

My heart was in the words.

I realized that the only part about being a forest ranger that ever appealed to me was the part where everybody broke out the s’mores and told stories. So I decided to leave nature out of it.

It’s only the stories I’m after.