Past flows into present—her shirt in the patterns of his tie, my grandfather in the leaves of September, new second grade pencils in the bonfire wind of late summer. And that longing, yearning for what we have that makes us the same, pulls us together in tight-fitting pieces that is what writing is to me. To dig for what makes us people buried underneath the day-to-day. To parse out how time’s thick, spiky petals can be pulled to reveal the heart and the meat that is in all of us. It isn’t then, it isn’t now, it isn’t mine but it is then, it is them, it isn’t us, it wasn’t me. All at the same time.

 I don’t remember much from early childhood. A wicker chair backlit gray with the light streaming in from a pink-curtained window. A red dress and a classroom trailer parked by clean, white cement. What I think I remember—banging on the piano with small fingers and legs too short to reach the pedals, playing bride with my baby blanket around my head—are probably reconstructed from family accounts, photos and home videos.

I’d love to say that I, age three, sat down in my Velcro shoes and my grandmother read me Huck Finn and I announced, “I’m going to write some day.” Instead, she read me the Goosebumps series, and afterwards I fell asleep. I wrote angry journals about how I hated all my friends and chronicled developing breasts in an obscene cartoon account. I’d love to assume that a pre-reading me babbling a strange narrative to go along with the pictures in The Cat in the Hat meant that I was fated to be a storyteller.

But I don’t believe in fate in any context. Writing in particular doesn’t allow for it, either in the craft or the story—a well-crafted story doesn’t just flow from a writer’s fingertips. The grand narrative is dead. Still, the act of writing seems like the closest thing to fate we’ve got. Sitting there, stuck on a nasty passage, staring at the dust on the floor with the coffee long cold, and there it is: a good sentence. It couldn’t have come from me. I was just staring at the dust on the floor.

But even now “fate” plays its tricks. Even if I don’t know where the sentence came from, it doesn’t come from nowhere. It comes from a place where backlit chairs and babbling Dr. Seuss get all mixed up and reconfigured so that while they belong to me, they belong to the story too. My syrupy and formless memories come streaming out, nearly unrecognizable and from an unknown destination, onto the page. They come to me in a way that mimics destiny, and I’ll look at the new sentence and think, this is the way things are supposed to be.

Maybe this is the only grand narrative that we have in the modern world: that old memories are sure to come around again. This is why I write.