We’re driving down the road, and it’s hot. It’s hot, and the chip bag is as empty as my parents’ promises that “we’ll be there soon.” The car has to be big enough to fit all of us kids, so it’s big enough that the air only circulates through half of the car so we start choking on each other's’ air and my mom soon reaches her breaking point with the complaints and the elbowing.

She’s learned her lesson with trying to play the quiet game, so instead she says, “Hey, let’s play the alphabet game.” Our elbows still. We quiet. “I see an A.” “And there’s an Applebee’s.” “B!” “I passed a Buick,” dad jumps in. And as we go through all twenty six letters and decide to start over again, for a time it seems that we don’t hate the very idea of being in the presence of each of our siblings, and for a while my sister isn’t thinking about how she can get back at my brother for pulling the head off of her Barbie, and for a while our elbows stay to ourselves, only moving to point out the window -- “Q!”

I am drowning inside of my head. They say our bodies are made up of around seventy percent water but the fact that I feel as if I can’t breathe leads me to think that’s too modest of a number. I am drowning and it’s hot, and I am choking, and as I reach my breaking point I hear my mother’s voice saying, “Hey, let’s play the alphabet game.”

Paper is my window and my pencil is the world. A. Apathy seems easier than getting out of bed. B. Beneath my window there’s a lamp and sometimes I turn it on just so I can see things exist outside of me. C. Can’t life just be a little bit less lonely? D. Don’t answer that. Because if life is being alone then why do we consider ourselves alive and if life can be filled with more then where did I go wrong?

I can’t breathe and I’m choking so I play The Alphabet Game. And when I place the letters next to each other maybe in ways that nobody has ever placed them before, I still. I quiet. For a moment I can breathe and I can put aside my vindictiveness against myself and against the world and I can see the letters and the way they make up everything and there is order and there is rhythm and there is reason. I am not a blur of thoughts; I am a string of expression. And we--the human race, all of us--are words: able to exist on our own, but beautiful, and powerful, as a sentence.