Handwriting

Writing is an interesting artifact, a friend of fact or enemy of denial; itself its own alibi. I found such an artifact today while packing - my first notebook from the beginning of this year. This watermarked worn 99 cent notebook gave itself bare as my mildest tenor of hope to approach empty lines with a nervous pen and say something true. As I began to write in January, I recognized the distance of my own handwriting.

Right now, amidst our life shaking itself upside down and into cardboard boxes, my mind has been categorizing thoughts into very long and largely useless itemized to-do lists - quite a dull spoon for the creative prime. So I've interchanged today's spoon with yesterday's knife.

I shyly dusted off this notebook and began to read, and in doing so I began to understand that we are never as far or as close to the past as we perceive; our distance from who we were or thoughts we once had is as far as the forgotten voice buried in a distant drawer or as near to our memory as the very last page. Especially when it speaks the solitude of our own hand, writing.

January 15, 2011
Layover in St. Louis
Back in the airport and it feels like coming back to an old familiar house - maybe not the one I grew up in but one I frequented often, enough to get a pitter-patter of excitement to visit, an uncertain smell, but a smell nonetheless, the abstract dark blue carpet pattern paving miles of airport walkways, as if it wants to be noticed but just can't be, a disguise of millions of footprints, travelers whose destination is not this place here, a medium of in-between. But the airport walls stand, glass and pleather seats, ready to be used, over and over again by strangers of short distances and long miles.

I feel in my bones a sense of connectedness to the disconnect, the detachment of wanting to be but being ignored, bad-looking flooring and garbage cans and overpriced commodities that have no earthly business costing quadruple their actual worth. But they all try to fit into the context, serve a purpose. A pointless t-shirt: "St. Louis Loves Me." Really? A city that doesn't know your voice, has never heard you cry or recognize that birthmark hidden beneath the nape of your neck; not one footprint on its river shore, a murmur of thought of its history - tensions racial enough to rip a hole in a child's American dream. Why would St. Louis love you? Ah, because you came, drank overpriced coffee, one sugar two creams on the steps of its outer windows, waiting to hitch your kite to the next ride out, far away and never back again. You can't even see the arch from your aerial hover. Not when you refuse to look any way but up, up, up to a heaven you wonder exists, falling closer to its cloudy wings than the ground below that holds you.

January 17, 2011
In Pittsburgh, 1:00pm
A good plain notebook is roomy, gives you the space of walking through an airport the wrong way with still enough room on either side of you for the oncoming travelers clamoring toward the footsteps you just left behind. I want to bulldoze, skate across, spin, spew, spit fire, take a big long metal detector to the hardened ground and find nothing below, throw rocks, chuck stones, lay down and roll away, feel the flat landscape, create foothills and mountains with their earth then sit amongst them and cry, laugh, dream with thoughts of them and get lost in their scent and imagine how I would feel if they were not there. You cannot do that without space that gives you permission to build.

January 18, 2011
I can't get enough, reading what I've written, wishing it could be enough. Reading Stephen King's "On Writing" and he demands 2000 words a day, prolific reading, and a no-less-than six days a week of writing, and that's only if you're a beginner. I already feel inadequate. When you see an unfocused dot that appears to be floating like a feather speck across a country river, you can follow it down with your eyes but can never get further than the rock bed. Maybe the dot I see are periods. Ends of sentences I can't finish. Winter seems buried in my lungs, and I can't cough it out.

So there's a girl I see in my head, maybe the one I'm trying to discover, she's got something to say. She's foul-mouthed and hilarious in certain honest moments. She lives beneath layers and sleeps with the truth but is awake with the mundane - smiles enough, laughs enough, exchanges pleasantries enough with just enough of the just right people. Her eyes stay above water, the rest of her - below. I don't know what she is capable of, what her motives are, or who she really is, but she's starting to nag.