Dropping Physics

I'm scared to write. Not just to put one word after another and perform some carpal locomotion with a drop or two of fetid brain drippings stirred in, but actually write. For the past seven months, I've written foolishly, meaninglessly in a trajectory that has put me back to the end of November in spite of summer's relentless pursuit these past few weeks.

Ideas aren't lacking. I've got too many ideas, ideas that cycle and reproduce and make new ideas that I still never follow-up on. The ideas are fresh; my writing is sclerotic, wasted.

(There are too many beetles to even focus here.)

(Moved, better.)

My hands even began to shake as I worked open the computer and started a page. A blank page, a mirror that has no reflection unless you force one into it. All I see looking back at me is nothing, fearful nothingness that urges me to retreat to my bed.

Pull the covers over my head, hide from the big, blank monster that still looms between the folded-up innards of my notebook.

Hold a ball, drop it. Physics will take care of everything else. I don't have to be responsible for the ripples in the water, but only for dropping the stone.

While I was organizing words - I still restrain myself from saying that I was writing - my Writing fell off the radar, a scant word here or an occasional attack on a napkin with a ball point, but nothing serious. Now that I'm left with the writing again, the writing seems harder than ever in spite of the ample time I allowed very good ideas to steep.

In the time away from writing, I began to reevaluate my language, the over-voice that hums without end as I amble through the days. That Voice might sound different now, or worse, might not be something I recognize anymore. Maybe it needs to change, to molt, to mutate, to cut something off to spite its tongue. Maybe it will be better, maybe it could be worse. It's one of those things where I'll never know until it's too late to do anything about it.

I've drank enough coffee today to sterilize a whale. Can't tell if that's working for or against me.

I call it your park although it only is so in namesake. Still, it is your park, pregnant with manufactured hauntings that are fitting for someone still aching for another person as I am for you.

I call it your park because it's a cheap gift shop souvenir that reminds me to remember you, to not pull the hook from my lip and set myself free. It's less of what you've done to me and more of what I've done to myself using you as my awl. Facts don't matter when imagination doesn't need them.

The thing I want from you I don't even know anymore. It's no more a want than a sky can want light or air; it simply has them and it is what it is. Mine is the void sky, a canvas that rejects all cyan and canary hues alike, something lacking but impossible to fulfill. Hunger that cannot be fed. Thirst that cannot be doused.

I call it your park because it is your park. I had been here before you, without you, but it ceased to be a place I knew of my own after I knew you. You skipped line, you came first. You who with stake and spade made this park over in your own image and then left me to flit across it with the beetles and the dead leaves.

We met unexpectedly at the corner. Your dress gray like February, your hair black like walnut oil, your shoulder bag as broad as your frame. Standing six feet from each other, the only reason I looked at you was because I was wearing sunglasses. I looked at you but I'm clueless as to what I saw because your own eyes plotted behind a pair of large, bug-eyed sunglasses. No smile, no smirk, no kink in the corner of your mouth. But you were facing me.

I counted cars as they passed. I counted down with the hazy orange numbers of cross-walk sign. I counted on you to say something but then the orange numbers disappeared leaving only the open-palmed orange hand.

"This is about to get somewhat awkward," I said.

You waited, as if I'd spoken to someone behind you, mistakenly to you as someone I thought I knew, to anyone except you before the pause hastily burst and you replied, "What?"

The crosswalk hand reached out. The cars slowed to the traffic light.

"This. We're about to cross the street and now we have to see who's going to take the initiative to walk quickly and who will try to lag behind so neither one of us aren't stuck awkwardly walking next to a stranger as we cross street."

"Oh, that," you started with a smile. "That always is a little weird, isn't it?" You said it with sincerity, as if we'd just been taught a secret handshake no one else in the world knew. It was a welcoming reply.

"Well, if you want, I'll let you get a head start," I offered. Even with the rest of the face easily visible in the afternoon barrage of sunlight, though so much could be divined from every other part of your body, that your eyes remained concealed behind sunglasses left me wholly in the dark about you. My offer hung like a "Marco" that must wait until "Polo" finally arrives.

I will write and re-write stories until I finally have something that doesn't make me want to shove my head in the oven. But I will write no matter what. Eventually, hope I'll carve off the shittier parts.