Lesley sat, fingering her keyboard. The emotions wanted to roll out of her like honey but they refused to. She back in her chair with a sigh. "Nobody said writing was easy", she mumbled. As she surveyed her shelves of books she felt a twinge of regret. This was her life. She had lived through her books. She had read about all these amazing places: London, the Sahara Desert, and Fiji but had never been outside of her hometown. She had never been really special, having been picked on in school for her vivid imagination.

Her heart heavy with emotion, she closed down her computer. Sure she was a famous novelist, but when the time came to write a biography about her they wouldn't be able to come up with a chapter. The phone rang and she eagerly picked it up, hoping it was someone important. It wasn't. It was her controlling mother, asking her for the umpteenth time this week if she would be able to come over for Thanksgiving. She re-affirmed her mother she would, though they lived but 5 minutes apart. As she listened to her mother rant on about her little friends, she recollected one of her characters in one novel she had written.It had resembled her mother, and she died in the end. Her mother loved that character the best and scorned Lesley when she made that character die. She gave a muffled laugh as she recalled her mother fury at her dying. When her mother finally stopped ranting, she gave a couple of her usual insults to Lesley, and hung up.

Lesley slammed the phone in disgust, grabbed her scarf and mitten, and went outside. Standing on her porch steps she swept her brown, curly hair out of her eyes. She had always subconsciously hid her sparkling blue eyes from people, in hopes to blend in. She started along the sidewalk, not knowing where she was going, just somewhere. Keeping her head down, she walked and talked to herself, hoping for some relief to the extreme sense of loneliness within her. She was out for a half-hour, then came home, having gotten no peace within her.

As she sat in her bed, curled up in her favorite color, thinking of an idea for a novel, she had an idea spring to life within her."What if I were to travel the world as a beggar and write about what I see?" She quickly tried to kill the thought, for fear she would actually consider it. But that thought quickly grew. Into an outline.

She tried to tell herself she was crazy, she needed to stay here and work on the book she had. Besides, where would she even start? She didn't have any money, any experience, nothing. She turned out the light and let her mind wander. Somewhere she didn't want it to go because the thought was to tantalizing. To the jungles of South America. Somewhere she had always wanted to visit. She fell asleep to the sound of monkey calls and birds chirping. That was about the time she convinced herself, in her dreams, she would go.

This week.

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This is a story about a young woman named Lesley. Lesley is a writer and like many writers is about to have a midlife crisis and she will do something drastic. She wants to see the world, write about what she sees. But not in style, oh no, she's seen to much of that. As a beggar.

Lesley: A 30-ish woman, writer, brown hair, blue eyes. Doesn't have much of a life.

updated Feb 1 by RosalynLivna