I was raised to put two spaces after a goddamn period. My dad, who made his bones typing on typewriters and all, taught me to, and he’s an English professor, so I listened to him. It’s only in the last year that I’ve broken myself of the habit, and honestly, I’m not really happy about it. The prose on the page now feels lesser, somehow, pale and prefab. It feels less like my writing and more like something I once wrote that’s had the life edited out of it and placed into a glossy brochure about the importance of good exercise or something. Oh sure, I should’ve stopped doing it a long time ago – handing in arts reviews to my editor at the Oberlin Review by running them on floppy discs from my dorm room to the production offices in the next building over, I was supposed to take out the double-space, and that was 12 years ago, for fuck’s sake. (Most of the time I did take them out, but only – and unreliably – ex post fact.) So yes, a sincere (sincere, sincerest) sorry to editors that I couldn’t actually remember to do so myself regularly before now. It is a reasonable and entirely correct request that you make, this single space. But still, but still, but still. The words here look like a vacuum-packed preservation of how they sounded in my head. A space’ll do that to you.