a feeling i could be someone.

[Joan of Arc, by Jules Bastien-Lepage]

"Dear God, please let me make something this beautiful--something that speaks of my time and place." --J. Kirk Richards, about this painting.

Isn't that the artist's prayer? Every artist's prayer?

We each have a wish to create something that will allow those after us to taste what it meant to live in our time and place.

Because, as Sappho wrote: "I declare that later on, even in an age unlike our own, someone will remember who we are."

And perhaps, just perhaps, that is why I keep writing. Imperfect as I am in this craft. But that someday, somewhere, I will create something that will speak of what it means to be a young, striving, ambitious Mormon woman in the early twenty-first century.

More particularly, what it means to be me in the early twenty-first century.

I might not have control over who tells my story once I'm gone. But at least I can leave conclusive evidence that I lived. 

For the future to remember. 

And that will have to be enough.