It took a year to write 324 words.
Midway Journal recently selected “Postcard from My Future Self: Inland Empire” as one of the contest winners in their flash prose contest. This micro essay began as part of an email not long after I moved away from the Bay Area in search of safety and peace. Every few months since completing graduate school, I participate in an email check in with several friends from my MFA cohort, sharing status of our lives along with writing progress. But shortly after I moved, I was stuck (in many ways). I sat with my computer on my lap, not knowing where to begin, or how to explain what had transpired. I looked out the window and began typing what I saw to describe my new location aware that the way we see the world shows our interiority. Though it wasn’t much, it was a start (in many ways).
I returned to that email often, wondering if there was an essay in those sentences but unsure of where to go with the words. Then, one morning, a roadrunner crossed my path and showed me the way.
Thank you to Allie Moriano, Lesley Nneka Arimah, and the team at Midway Journal for the award and for publishing my work. There’s poetry in receiving an honor for writing about redemption. I am deeply grateful.
If you have a chance, please also read the beautiful flash prose of other winners–“Moving Out” by Kate Simonian and “Dazzlement” by Lee Reilly. I am honored to be placed alongside them.