The Writer
At the creeping, undead hour of four in the morning, the writer lies awake.
The pain of sleeplessness is nothing to the restlessness of the unwritten.
It’s a mad scramble, the writer begging her mind to stop in its tracks, fear that if she can’t get that Word document open in time, she just might lose that train forever.
Inevitably, she will – the sonnets sung between the bed and the computer chair, the poetry crafted with her wide eyes open in the darkness, staring at the ceiling with the silver dagger of moonlight cast upon it from an askew blind. There will be casualties. Perhaps it is her masterpiece the writer loses in those precious few moments, in those itchy seconds when she wrestles between somnolent darkness and the searing alertness of the computer screen.
The writer never ceases to write. She imagines what could be. The writer takes what has been and imagines what almost was and what never should be. She replays life, calling cut, replacing set pieces and characters, and re-shooting. She conducts effortless monologues describing the power of song and the agony of indigestion.
She considers the old English way of spelling certain words and ponders her disdain for the word “theatre” when it is spelled with an “er.” She toys with the paradox that the things so strictly unique are the most universal. She wonders at the heaviness in a dog’s sigh.
The writer catches herself recording meticulously the way a friend runs her index finger around the rim of her wine glass when she has run out of things to say. Then the writer pushes further – what could this mean? Is she bored? Uncomfortable with silence? Lost in thought? How might the writer use this…
The world to the writer is always this: Scraps of prose, poised and prepared – a scatter-brained mass of endless notes needing plucking and reorganizing. The writer always sees dually. There is the Person, living, experiencing. Then there is the Writer, recording, organizing, dissecting, reconstructing. Each moment exists on both planes at once, effortlessly, as if Writer might be a genetic trait or a mutation caused by contaminated drinking water. A terminal illness: Inescapable.
Living at once inside and outside of herself is exhausting. The writer is tired, yet never tires. She lets the familiar chords stir symphonies in her gut. Lets it? Ha! It takes monumental effort to stifle it! She sees her life and yearns to live it. The writer wrestles the stirrings and pins them to the ground in sweaty dominance – “No! Not now!”
And when the writer is there, concentrating her duality into one life, she is more there than anyone. Layers of the present drip from her like a melting Technicolor dream-coat.
At the crawling, opening hour of five in the morning, the writer sees no more.
It burst forth and suddenly, jarringly, ran dry. But she has learned never to expect the flow to behave like water. How neat it would be to give it such principles. The writer knows better. She cannot try attaching science or math, areas she never quite excelled in. To attach two things, one must have a firm grasp on each. In the right hand, one can hold the exact distance from the Earth to the Moon. In the left…
In her left, a plea for sleep. No, for rest. The writer never hopes for sleep. The writer worries what could be lost in those unconscious hours.