Mom asks me regularly about my writing, in that sort of soft, “I-don’t-want-to-scare-you-off-by-sounding-too-intense-about-this-so-I’m-going-to-pretend-I-don’t-care-much-but-I-really-think-it’s-important” voice. Because when your mother is a therapist, that voice is a Thing. So she asks, and I groan. And then, conveniently, along comes a blog and here I am, forced in some matriarchal master-plot to put words to paper.
“Write about your dream,” she tells me. We were talking about blogs the other day, the idea that you can illustrate, crystallize a single thought. This dream seems like the perfect candidate. I can describe it, the sensory recognition of finding myself in a place that used to be home. I can remember the smooth floors and the slant of the sunlight, so familiar it feels like I’ve never left. I can pull you all into it, bring back the places you have loved, the shock at feeling the depth of that connection even years later. I can tie it all neatly with a bow. But I don’t want to.
For me, life right now is a sharp, fuzzy, whirling dervish of a blur that is so far from being crystallized it’s almost comical. People try and ask me where I’ll be in a month, two, six, and I giggle maniacally. Genuine questions about what I’m doing get the most brief three word answer, because the real answer, the five page one, is something even I haven’t figured out how to make coherent. Most days, I feel less like I am teetering on a precipice than that I am about to come untethered. Falling not down but up, hurtling and tumbling through layers of clouds.
And I like this. I don’t want to write about it. I don’t want it to make sense, any of it. I want to ride a motorcycle down the peninsula and sit on a dock in the Maine summer eating fish, and then maybe, never remember this evening again. I want for a few minutes to stop thinking, to be overwhelmed. To feel life pummeling me on the head.
So, I’m going for a run. And then I’m going to spend the afternoon working on an old boat, because for now, that’s enough. Mom, you can ask me again about my writing in six months.
