The windows weren’t sealed quite right. The curtains would twist and tangle with each other at any blow of September wind. The floors were uneven and creaked phantom moans. Sunlight would bleed through the poorly sealed windows, casting shadows across the uneven floor, begging for brokenness to be whole.

This is a short piece I wrote about a week ago. I hope you like it ----- It was a hot day, I remembered. It was the kind of day where, in its memory, it never seems as unbearably awful as when it was experienced. The waters of the coast swelled and fell over each other. They sent up a spray that would caress your face. The sand had more of the consistency of mud, which I didn’t mind. Millie did, though. “Why must we come down here?” It would cake up on her legs, and if she sat on her beach towel, the sand would stick to it, too. It would take three washes just to get it off. She didn’t like that, which meant she rarely came with me. The times she did come were always my favorites. We would sit there, listening to the waves and watching the sun turn the horizon to the color of a citrus fruit. Millie did like that. “It’s so beautiful, isn’t it?” “It is.” Sometimes she would ask me when I was going to marry her. I told her I didn’t know. Then she would get really quiet. The day that I remember best was a Tuesday. The tide was in. It came up just a few inches short of where I was sitting. The horizon was that citrus-fruit-color, and I was lying out in the sand, counting the leaves of a palm frond that hung twenty feet above my head. I do not remember exactly how many, but I remember that it was close to a hundred. Millie was with me. She was standing idly in the water about waist-deep. Her blonde hair was pulled back into a ponytail. White clouds meandered above the beach like they had nothing to do. “When are you going to marry me?” she called from the water. I sat up, looking at her. She had a wonderful look in her eye that made me feel like all the beauty around me was void. I shrugged, smiling. “Why not today?” Millie lit up then. I don’t think I had ever seen a person so alive. It was frightening and perfect. Just then, the beach became, for an hour or so, a place like no other. It became a paradise.

What’s the strangest place inspiration has ever found you? Some of my best lines have shown up when I didn’t have my notebook, my “writer mood,” or even a second to breathe. Inspiration is honestly feral. It doesn’t knock. It breaks in. Maybe it found you: in the shower in a doctor’s office waiting room half-asleep at 3AM at work (when you absolutely were not supposed to be thinking about poetry) in the middle of an argument in the grocery store aisle holding pasta like it held your entire life together ✨ Tell us: what’s the strangest place inspiration ever hit you—and what did it give you? A line? A scene? A character? A whole plot? Bonus points if you drop the line/idea you captured from that moment 👀