After the Writer

If I could call back from the beyond every page I’ve ever written, there would be hundreds of pages I wrote before I ever wanted to be a writer.  Then there would be thousands and thousands of pages I wrote when I wanted to be a writer, when my teacher said that I could be and I believed her.  Then would come this page, which seems to me the first page of afterwards, when that wish had become too painful and too cumbersome to sustain, and yet I continued to write without stopping.  This both is and is not an admission of defeat.  I had to give up the dream of ever becoming a writer.  It got in the way of writing.