Last night was late.

The half moon shone bright

Cast on my dog’s head.

His tail wagged

Like it does

When he’s tired;

He knew it was time,

Time to go to bed.

We went in the house,

And his brown ears twitched

At the sound of

Rat claws in the walls.

It had been past time

To call the pest guy

For a while.

At least

I had a dog

To keep them

Out of our room.

He sleeps on my bed.

I know that my sheets

Are not too clean,

But I can’t sleep

When it’s just me

In the bed,

When I don’t have

The warmth of one

Whose heart beats,

Whose blood flows like mine,

Next to me.

I have a hard time

With sleep these days,

In the midst

Of the cold months;

And, of course,

When no one

Can go on a date

To save their life,

I’m SOL.

I let my dog

On the bed first,

Then I crawled in

Next to him,

One hand

On a soft, brown ear,

A smile on my lips,

And my eyes closed.

My Twitter drafts folder is the same tweet, reformatted five times. The same joke, delivered poorly, five unique times. There are no spelling errors, and the grammar meets the standards of the colloquialisms we have all come to understand in our internet parallel universe.

Language is a living entity; it lives and breathes and evolves and ages and contracts diseases and grows malignant tumors that metastasize into entire systems that harm its speakers and its own lifespan. And language dies. We do not attend its funeral, we hold no memorial, but its memory is honored through its legacy. Language begets language: in the same way that Latin’s progeny has become the collective Romance languages, we honor what once were widely spoken and common tongues with our words today.

We may follow this same line of reasoning in regard to what we call “good writing:” what once were fast-held beliefs about the rules of writing are rapidly evolving with language and society at large. The internet has the beautiful and terrifying ability to progress society at breakneck speed. We are able to watch the advancement of language and writing within a generation, where once we might not have seen significant change for a century or more.

What has not changed is the act and purpose of writing itself. Good writing is the ability to communicate using the words raised by our ancestors, whose growth we continue to foster. Good writing can convey sentiment or meaning - using whatever words we have at our disposal (and in this way we may refer to our literary children as tools) - from one person to another. Good writing is being able to touch another human or group of humans with one’s words, regardless of the skill with which they are forged together.

I am still having trouble landing on the right format for my Tweet. Maybe I’ll scrap it to make room for a better joke.

I’m gonna have to kill the fly. It’s been flying around my bedroom for a few days now. I keep my door closed, so the poor thing has no chance of escaping. It’s my third day of wallowing. I chose today to lie fetal in my bed; there isn’t enough space for two living things to share this tiny room. My depression has grown, engulfing the darkest corners of my little sunlit box, and exhaustion threatens to overtake me on my last day of theoretical health. I’m gonna have to kill the fly. Each time it enters my periphery my irritation grows, pushing my comfortable inertia to the sides of my consciousness. I sink deeper into my too-soft mattress. I wish I had a fly swatter. Not one of those plastic tennis rackets but a person to swat the fly for me. I guess the room is big enough for two people but not for one depressed person and a fly. I’m gonna have to kill this damn fly. My bed is having trouble swallowing me. I am too large a mouthful. I pull the covers up, forcing myself down its throat. The fly has become obsessed with the duvet around my head. I can’t seem to drown out its awful buzzing. How can a fruit fly make such a cacophony? It forces itself into my queen-sized bed. Fine. I emerge to reach for a tissue from the box on my bedside table. It’s empty. How annoying. I get up, go to the bathroom for a few sheets of toilet paper. When I return to make contact, the fly is nowhere to be found.