I am not a fan of math. There is no softness to it; a page full of problems is as sharp to me as a drawer of knives. Everything must be just so. There is only one answer to any question. It's not like language, not like English. You can't wiggle in math or turn things round and round until a number becomes an equation or some part of your human soul. Math is soul-less.

Math is hard, desolate, and full of nightmares. Even the symbols look threatening. The square root sign leers at me, daring me to look inside its lifeless box. I turn in fear and a wall of x's rises up, their identities unknown. A tangent prods me in the back, wanting me to go on, but I can't. I flee, leaving my homework behind on the bed.

In class, the fog lifts. I feel like a god, manipulating the numbers and variables as I wish. In my triumph, I slip, blink, and it feels as if I were gone for a year. On the board, numbers and letters laugh at me, shapes twisting and rendering my brain mush. Incomprehension jumps on my back and drags me down, drowning me.

The bell is my lifeguard, and I am saved. I flee, running to the safety of words and war. I can live the life of any other person, animal, or plant that someone writes about. Words allow me to be a butterfly, a blade of grass, even Thoreau's transparent eyeball. Whitman can encourage me to lie nude in the grass as I build empires of air. Dickinson can be at my back and offer me glances at the divine solitude of her soul. English is my peace and my heart.

The terror of math is everywhere, though. Science laughs at me over its glasses and long pages of words that burn no lamp in my soul. It traps me, leaves me stranded in a dipole world, suffocating me with thick, heavy gases. I stop, I shiver, I turn inward.

Words fly from the tip of my pencil onto sheets. With these words and thoughts I make my bed and determine what my future will be. I pour my heart and mind and soul into squiggles of roundness that stretch across huge spaces only to curl back around me like a nest. It is in words that I find my center.