Dear Magnificent Nonbeing,

I was taught to write thank-you notes with almost militant adherence.

Growing up, my little girl hands curled around Bic pens and scribbled into notecards adorned with lupine and flowing script, trying to translate the gratitude I felt (a swell of excitement in my belly, my shaking hands grasping for some bagatelle, holding my breath as I ripped paper from pretty parcels) into words that some adult would think sincere.

It seemed to me, even then, that adults rarely understood how children felt, so thank-you notes posed an interesting transliterate challenge.

Being that I do not know what you are — if you are anything at all — I write this not knowing if it will ever transcend the bounds of human praise.

Sometimes, I think I can remember where I was before.

Not a place seen, only ever felt.

I like to think that I lived centuries nestled in the spine of a book.

Or perhaps I was the sound a heeled boot makes against cobblestones.

I might have been a coffee bean.

Or a scraggly mutt traipsing through a shadowy street.

I think, for a time anyway, I was whatever natural mathematical precision creates the space between the leaves of trees where slants of light cut through.

At times, I’m convinced I was that gust of wind that always seems to carry away the hat of an unsuspecting man.

Occasionally I suspect I was once — maybe twice — the sustaining pedal of a grand piano; if only because I seem to be very good at drawing things out for too long.

Despite my self-consciousness around inhabiting this freckled, tightly-hugging skin, I don’t think this is my first go-round in human form.

I am forever weighted down by inexplicable weariness and a kind of delightful certainty that the prospect of death shouldn’t bother me one bit.

And it doesn’t.

It never has.

Thank you for at least having the decency to drop me back into the mortal coil in the springtime, when everything was coming into bloom around me and I could flounder unspectacularly for a few months entirely undetected.

I’ve always been thankful for beautiful diversions, quietly hoping that perhaps one day I’ll become one.

I do wonder, though, if you mistakenly let me come into this life with the same body I died in last time around.

I’ve always had the distinct feeling of having had been hastily stuffed into this one, so roughly that my skin caught on a few sharp, bony edges and that’s why my exterior never quite lined up right with my interior.

Like a dress that needs to be taken in, it just never hung right. Maybe the universal economy took a bad hit in the late ’80s and you had to recycle some old, discarded human costumes. Maybe you cut baby-sized me from the previous season’s fashions (or previous, previous, previous — who knows when I died last).

There I was, a wrinkly newborn who stayed bald for a very long time.

A very tiny old woman, toothless and crotchety, who grew up to be a child-sized old woman who carried around giant purses full of oddities and hard candies, listened to music that even predated her parent’s generation and made friends with all her teachers.

(Did you intentionally doom me to be premature adult or did I do that to myself? Asking for a friend.)

Either way, it all worked out.

I’m glad I’m here.

The world is exciting and even though it gives me headaches and sometimes I have to sit in my car near a large body of water and pick at my scalp until I calm down, for the most part, the anxiety of living here is worth it.

Interesting things happen to me every day.

I am usually astonished by breakfast and in need of a nap by lunch.

I only mean to thank you for plopping me down here, even though it’s been miserable at times.

On more than one occasion I’ve kissed the void.

But even then, I picked up a handful of the galaxy inside of me and rubbed it into my gums, letting it flow through my bloodstream.

Intoxicated by my own little celestial verve, I turned off the darkness and gave the light a second chance.

Sometimes I am a girl and other times I am a ghost, but when you cut me I bleed stardust, and when I die let my earthly trappings find their final destination in a constellation. Next time around, furnish me with a newer model. Or retire me from circulation. Either way is fine.

I was never particularly good at being concise.

My thank-you notes, with their slanted, hurried handwriting, almost always went on to the back of the notecard where they would be smudged. Sometimes thank-you notes turned into thank-you letters.

When you were done stuffing me into this body and started pouring cosmic grit into my little noggin I think you gave me too many words, not accounting for how many I would acquire from living and reading and loving — so they pour out my skull now, live in the marrow of my bones, under my tongue and in that little sweet-smelling dip behind my left ear.

You gave me seemingly limitless morphemes but somehow tripped up the wires between my brain and my lips, so most of them float around untethered in my internal cosmos. Occasionally I catch a falling star, spit it out, someone gives me a little money for my wares. Thank you for all the words, they are my greatest love. (I only wish you’d checked the wiring.)

But please, don’t think me ungrateful.

I’m only writing to let you know that, in spite of everything,

I am having a very good time.

Hi, I’m Abby! Thanks for reading this thing. Give it a ❤ and follow me on Twitter. Then read the rest of my weird shit, please.