Half an inch to the right.

A few days or weeks or months ago, I was digging through a box from my attic and found a twenty-page paper on gender fluidity in Woolf's Orlando.

I'm guessing this isn't something one usually finds crammed next to their Christmas tree.

But alas, there I was, digging deep into the brain crevices of another Ericka, one who was apparently lauded for her "brilliant" exposé on the male-female dichotomy being nothing more than a simple social construct and yet, who also routinely transposed her homophones.

Nobody's perfect.

What that paper didn't comment on was how fluid I felt when the night was dark and the drinks were strong.

How nothing has any meaning at all if you try hard enough.

But what can't be penned away (regardless of how many homophones you indeed mix up) is that God is a God of predictability, set parameters, a plus b equaling c, and the moon never shifting half an inch to the right.

That you can redefine any construct at all that you'd like but too much vodka equals too much toilet, and a hangover never looks good on anyone.

I can rewrite my world any way I want regardless of the fact that I was not nor ever have been the one who created it.

And even though I've constructed the details of my finite minutes, I keep living like nothing's finite at all, like death has no sting.

And yet, it still does, unless you accept the ransom is paid.

The new Ericka has, of course.

But the old one is still shifting through an existence of her own making, sweating thin lines of ink between the spaces of one word to another, where up is down and down is up, the box is dark, and everything reeks chemically of fir.