The sky is a dull greyish-blue, with hints of pink at the edges where the sun is trying to peek up to my side of the world.

She seems to be a little bittersweet today, like she is remembering something that she no longer has, and she wants it back.

Some would say it is a terrible start to a day, but I think otherwise.

If the sky where bright yellow with joy everyday, I would feel as if I don't belong in this world.

I am not always happy and I like to think that the sky has many different colors of emotion too.

aren’t i lucky to have found the love of my life so soon?

perhaps.

but that just gave me an abundance of time to lose them.

and stupidly, foolishly, i did.

I look in the mirror and think to myself

Whose body is this?

Everything I know about it I’ve learned from someone else

Age nine eating cherry popsicles in a purple two piece

My neighbor licks the syrup from her lips before declaring that my butt’s a bubble

She’d very much like to pop

And I look at my reflection in the sliding glass door

Having never considered the size or shape of it until this moment

Strange that the longer I stare, the larger it grows

Now I always take a picture from behind before I leave the house.

Age 10 “dating” a boy named Jamie with golden blonde hair shaped like a bowl

Passing notes covered in smiley faces with their tongues hanging out

Are you tired? Because you’ve been running through my mind all day.

Until recess when it turned out he was the one who was tired

Tired of me

He didn’t want a girl whose chest was flat

Like a commercial, he taught me I was missing something

Though I’d just given up on Santa Claus the year before

Age 11 taping cotton balls inside my JCPenney training bra

Age 14 sewing cups into my one-piece bathing suit

Age 16 sticking rubber chicken cutlets against my nipples

Now I always refuse help from the Victoria’s Secret ladies.

Age 20 breaking up with my first love

My body nearly disappears and yet

It receives more attention from men than ever

When I’m 105 it doesn’t seem to matter much if I’m dead inside

Because I’m warm to the touch

And the tight waist of my double zero jeans keeps my guts from spilling to the floor

I’m starving, but I swear it’s the lust that makes me dizzy

Age 21 eating a steady diet of Zoloft, cereal bars and gin buckets

I am brought back to life

With curves jumping from the page of my story like a pop-up book

I am soft flesh again

And my roommate says she’s happy for me but also

She likes going back to the way things were

See, I need to be the bigger one

Because there’s only room for one manic pixie dream girl at every basement party

So I make a photo collage of my before-and-after body

I am thin and dead then fat and alive

All on one poster board

I hide it underneath my bed and dream that I am a sinking anchor

Now my roommate and I don’t speak.

Age 25 percolating with possibilities, I’m a woman in the city after dark

A tall man acknowledges I am alive until we get to the bar

Where he finds a leggy blonde

Who laughs and bites him with unnaturally white teeth

I receive unsolicited advice from the tall man’s friend

A 24-year-old version of John Belushi

He puts his hands on my shoulders and spits in my ear

He’s never going to go for a girl like you!

The bass pounds through my chest

While he stares at me like I’m the last dog in the pound

The guy that looks like he’s from Animal House

So I make my way back to my apartment

My ugliness reflected in a hundred windows

Illuminated by the streetlights for the whole world to see

Now I know the question’s answer

My body is yours

And I just live there

Beneath its skin

Right atrium

Energy depleted

Empty blue

Seeking inspiration

Right ventricle

Closer to freedom

A forceful gust of green

Nearing the breath of life

Left atrium

An acrylic masterpiece

A burst of color

Endless possibilities

Left ventricle

Dreams become actions

Rebirth and creation

Illuminating the body

An endless cycle

Hope and fear

Birth and death

Purpose and uncertainty

A beautiful journey

The heart

I guarantee when most us think of famous writers and booze, we immediately call to mind the likes of Hemingway, Faulkner and Bukowski. Hemingway staring out at the sea, slamming a glass of whiskey on his desk. There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed. Faulkner sipping mint juleps from his favorite metal cup, swishing it in his mouth through one cerebral musing after the next. I never know what I think about something until I read what I've written on it. Bukowski sitting on the edge of an unmade bed, chain smoking and drinking bourbon straight from the bottle. I do all my writing when I’m drunk. All the time I type I’m drunk.

It's a rarity that I speak to a male writer who doesn't also list one of these men as an inspiration. Feel free to swap out Philip Roth or Henry Miller and so on and so forth, as the cup overfloweth when it comes to mysoginist authors who have some notable experience with or kinship to liquor of all kinds. Now, this is not to say that you cannot learn valuable lessons about both writing and life from these men while at the same time recognizing that some of their work - whether only in part or in its entirety - is chauvinist drivel. If through time travel or otherwise I was given the opportunity to speak to one of them, I would first happily pick his brain about process and then just as he is expecting a compliment to conclude our spirited discussion, I'd lay a quick punch into his face and run, laughing all the way home.

As for their own glamorizing of and/or fascination with alcohol, this must be a similarly nuanced conversation. People often think that alchohol fuels creativity by relaxing the mind so it may open wider, or that it heightens emotion, thus allowing for a bloodletting on the page that Hemingway could be proud of. But I wager that it is less so the alcohol and more so the tragedy or mental illness or insecurity or anger (and the list goes on) that causes them to reach for it that truly fuels these writers, and what makes their work sing. Can you be a writer without pain? Without being a little mad in some way? Surely. But will that writing speak viscerally to the reader? Of that I'm not so certain.

As I myself drink and read, I have a particularly visceral reaction - one of rage - that becomes quite palpable when revisiting excerpts from the aforementioned writers famous works. Some write of alter-ego-type characters commiting an array of heinous acts - the most grotesque of which is often to rape women quite casually, without regard to age or mental capacity. While simply Googling any of their names in conjunction with various derogatory terms for women and/or their body parts produces a breathtaking plethora of results. You can forgive a young cunt anything. A young cunt doesn't have to have brains. They're better without brains. But an old cunt, even if she's brilliant, even if she's the most charming woman in the world, nothing makes any difference. A young cunt is an investment; an old cunt is a dead loss. All they can do for you is buy you things. But that doesn't put meat on their arms or juice between their legs.

At the same time, as I read them, I'm also driven to raucous laughter. They recount with incredulousness women who don't succumb to their charms, while quietly footnoting that they happened to be covered in their own vomit at the time of the encounter. The absurdity of these shrinking men shouting their machismo on every page as if somehow writing it down will make it true sends me into fits of cackling like the witch I am as I sit at my desk drinking tea from a black mug donning the words"Male Tears".

I hope the next time you think about alcohol and writers, you think of someone new. Someone arguably more worthy of your attention. Tonight, I've decided to drink to Dorothy Parker, who unlike her male compatriots, didn't self-mythologize in her writing while under the influence. I'm not a writer with a drinking problem, I'm a drinker with a writing problem. Instead, she makes the reader laugh with her lethal wit and biting insight into herself and others. Her work explored all the things that mattered - race, violence and inequality - giving you a window into the social activist she was off the page. When she died, having no one, she left her entire estate to Martin Luther King, Jr. and suggested that her epitaph read, Excuse my dust.