A Thousand Things

A thousand things I wanted to write today. A thousand things got pushed aside. A bossy idea is ruling my head today. It won't let the others have their say. Oh well, Bossy. Have it your way, but I'm not going to talk about you yet.

The gray and rain is back. I read things about things, you know. I read about the rain inside some people's heads. I read about how it sometimes falls down their cheeks. I read and listen to the tiny rain fingers drum on my greenhouse window. I read things that others write. They pour out their hearts and exercise their rights, they show themselves in tiny ways. I stopped reading when I got to "irregardless" and then I felt bad. But not bad enough to push past that word and soldier on. My eyes have other things to see to.

A thousand things I wanted to write today. A thousand things got kidnapped and stowed away in dank corners and forgotten folds in my brain. Their ransom notes come to me as half-finished posts and sentences that do not satisfy. I'm not sure I want to pay to get them back.

The quiet is back. It seeps around me and fills me up. So much I can't hear the dying stories strangling in my head. So much. I looked around, a halfhearted attempt at collecting the bits and pieces a monkey hurricane has left in its wake. Collecting my thoughts, collecting the socks, the blocks, the little bits of paper, collecting the nerve to do something. The large and quiet of something big, something looming just outside my vision. The quiet of my own space and everything and nothing to do.

A thousand things I wanted to write today. A thousand things skittered and hid. They clambered over the practical things of life and hid behind them, cowering. They sit and they snivel and play with misdirection, shouting a list of things I need to do. "Do not waste your ink on us," they say. "There are forms to fill out. There are checks to write. There are grownup things waiting." I called them cowards, but listened to them anyway.

In spite of it all, the fire is back. It has been smoldering, almost snuffed for years. But for some kindling here, a sudden flare there, it would have been gone. It's back, it's there, it's building and it will not be ignored. In spite of rain and hurricanes, disconnection and deafening quiet, it's there.

A thousand things I will write some day. I wrote one today and that is all I ask. I'll write another tomorrow and a thousand tomorrows after that if they're given to me. I wrote one today. One. Slowly, clumsily, in this stiff-legged baby-walk way, gripping the edges of things for support, I'm walking forward into what I want. One little malformed, flawed, defected offering far surpasses a thousand intentions unfulfilled.