The subtitle of these musings is more of an ideal than the truth. I’m not sitting at a desk as I write this. In fact I don’t own a proper desk. Right now my desk is the tray table on American Airlines flight 131, seat 32G from London to New York. A few days ago it was a chunky British Pub table at a pub in Cornwall, England that offered free wi-fi, free jukebox, and free refills on coffee.

I have many desks around the world but I’d have to say airplanes are probably my favorite. I’m not sure what it is about being 30,000 feet in the air that compels me to write (but I usually do) until my computer battery dies or the stewardess tsk tsks. Sticky tables at coffee shops in Brooklyn with flocks of kids à la mode gliding by are also a favored spot. My kitchen table from Ikea is one of my old standbys but I find it hard to concentrate there since, like most New Yorkers, my kitchen is my living room, dining room and bedroom.

While living in Istanbul, my desk was an odd plastic and metal table. I sat in a red vinyl-covered chair with cigarette burns and chrome legs. Most of the time, I sat there drinking bad instant coffee and overly romanticizing the foreign city streets and sounds. I made the ancient buildings more glorious in my mind and in my stories than they were to my eyes when I stood in front of them. I would stew in jealousy and anger from the raw truth that by no amount of effort or desire would I ever be European. For a few reasons, that plastic table was one of my more epic desks; one) it was in Istanbul, two) it was a couple blocks from where one of my favorite writers, Orhan Pamuk, grew up, and three) I was in an ever-so-dramatic era and quest to find myself so my writings were, in a word…dramatic.

Another of my favorite desks, and one I have used a lot lately, is my friend’s vintage table in her Brooklyn kitchen with 1970’s velvet chairs. The window looks out into a small cement courtyard behind her ever-so-Brooklyn apartment building. Across the yard someone keeps caged pigeons outside their backdoor.

The obvious default desk is my lap which has seen many hours of desk substituting, as has my bed. I usually prop up with pillows or lay on my stomach. In both of those cases I usually write poems.

I love going to my parents’ house in Iowa and writing in my old bedroom which still has my childhood desk. It’s filled with girly trinkets and notes from 6th grade friends and there’s something jovial and innocent about the delicate flowers painted on its pale wood. When I’m there, I usually don’t use it. I’d rather not taint it with my thoughts as an adult (am I really an adult, now?). I think it prefers to remember me as a frilly sun-dressed little girl who drew hundreds of pictures of horses on it.

The idea of writing at a desk is so romantic to me that it’s almost intimidating. A desk to a writer is like a lover to the lonely; it’s where you dream, where you create, where you toil and where you’re ok with unlocking some doors and letting parts of you out, or foreign things in. A writer can’t flippantly sit down at a desk. It’s always intentional. A writer sits at a desk in hopes that the pictures, quotes, tears, and ideas pent up inside will flow out like liquid and mean something to someone. A desk stands for so much more than to hold a computer or paper and a pen.

I imagine the best writers find their perfect desk and position it in the very spot in their house where their mind’s windows open up, a breeze blows the curtains around and they fall back on their first love, words on paper. I imagine my favorite writers wandered around when they were my age looking for that one spot, that place where everything lines up and all the hooks are unhooked. I imagine they pick their desk with as much meticulousness and excitement as they did their spouse, and they set up their home with their desk as the heart, the muscle that pumps life throughout the other rooms and picture-strewn hallways. They set their desk in the portal that connects them with something larger than they are, something that feeds their desire to create a new and beautiful pattern of letters and words that may end up in a stack of papers in a drawer, or even in the trash. Or it may end up in the hands of someone who needed those words in that order.

These writings are indeed from a Gen Y’er but they weren’t written at a desk. I haven’t found mine, yet. They come from various locations on my journey to figure some things out, hopefully inspire someone, and maybe someday find that place where I’ll want to stay a while. If that happens, my desk will be of dark cherry wood with good sturdy legs, and big drawers for photos and newspaper clippings. I will call it home.