I always have so many things I’d like to write about and never the place to write them when the time comes. I’ll be on the bus, waiting in the rain for transit to come, and a word will hit me, a phrase related to something I saw that day and there’s nothing I can do about it. I feel somehow that something is starting to infect my brain, some sort of prophet is calling vocal in my head when I’m not listening. Where are the words coming from? I’d like to tell myself I’m imagining it, this growing desire to share the world, show you and you and you the man on the bus who talked like Kurt Vonnegut to his beautiful shining son or the delivery man who mistook me for a hooker on my way out the door because I looked too good to be leaving the house at six p.m. I want to sing knowledge into being, shine it from my bones in a bioluminescent fame. It’s not about proving the importance of anything, but showing a little that maybe everything is. A point of view from a different part of the world. I don’t know what my intention is, I certainly don’t believe I’m any good at this. I can’t even pretend.
Someone wants me to write them a story for them to publish.
Take my heart and crush it in a fist, I don’t know what to do. They want fiction, a certain number of words, more than I’ve ever written at once. They want a story, with plot and idea. For some reason I think of fairy tales, Rapunzel let down your hair and let me write about it. I’d love to take the quills of angels, but it’s not going to happen. There’s rain outside my window and I look out into an empty sky, unfufilling. I don’t know how to write stories. I don’t think I understand how words lock in place together. I don’t want to do this unless I can touch where I need to.
I want you near me. I want you to hold me and let me write to you. I want warmth to take me, seep into me. I want your hands locked around my waist and I want your breath to flutter in my hair. It’s an empty thought, just a palisade regret of another time and place that I’ve never had happen. Digital cloud and air. I need a better chair, for one. One where we can both sit and drowse in being comfortable. Just to be with you might be enough, but you know I want to write about it. Take these hands and let the fingers dance across my black keyboard with the white printed letters. I could never be anything like you are, I could never see that waxy light burning on the inside of my skull. It’s not why I love you, but it helps sometimes, when I miss you. I can take out the pain in the stories and dream us into being. In my mind, your tongue might taste of lemonade and I like it that way, that I don’t know right now because I’m tired and it’s late at night. If you were to stay, it would be anti-climactic and the worst day of our lives. I suspect we’re monomeric and playing attendant to it, our house falling down into something beautiful. I’ll drink to you one day, when you’re not looking, but you’ll hear me. I’ll make sure of it.