Victoire wrote, past tense. She handed in her notebooks and ink and moments captured in eclectic handfuls of words when she was twelve. When she was twelve she read poetry about ideas, poetry with rhythm and structure and purpose. When she was twelve she read stories about people, stories with characters and plots and settings. When she was twelve she read guidebooks: here is poetry, they said. Here are stories. Here is how to be like them.
She wasn't like them, so she shoved her scrawlings to the back of the drawer and forgot.
Later, she meets Teddy. Later, owls fly between them, so many letters through so many skies. Later, he says, wow, the way you phrase things… do you write poems? Stories? Can I see? And she shakes her head and blushes and says, not poems, not stories, but when I was a kid I used to… just stupid kid things, you know…
And takes her writings out and shows him. Not stories, not poems, just moments. Real moments, imagined moments, moments scrawled in messy phrases and neat perfectly phrased ones, hers or not—she looks at her moments, and remembers. She starts a new notebook, and when it fills, she starts another. Victoire writes, present tense.