HeartStrung

In college, I got a little obsessed with coffee. Somehow I got it in my head that writers drink coffee. Part of this, I’m sure, was because my writing professors always carried around their coffee mugs. They had their mugs sitting on their desks during class. They had them on their desks during office hours. They walked down the halls carrying their mugs. I’d meet with other writers from my classes and they too would have their cups of coffee while we wrote.  I started ordering coffee and drinking it but I never really liked it. Beyond the jittery feeling, it also made my stomach hurt. Still, I kept drinking it for a time. I tried different flavors, like hazelnut thinking that might help. I do love hazelnut. I tried adding lots of creamer and sugar. That only made my stomach more upset. And then one day I learned that one of my writing professors only ever had water inside his mug. This was a revelation to me. I realized then that the tactic I’d been using at parties, of filling my...

  I reach, right arm across,      twisting paraspinal muscles,          stretching but only succeed     in straining          inflamed tissue.

I caught myself criticizing my home the other day. In all honesty, it's not an unusual occurrence. I live in a double-wide and I feel self-conscious about this fact sometimes. Our double-wide, like all double-wide's, is a long rectangle. It's difficult to furnish and feel comfortable in rooms that are long and rectangular. They're just the wrong shape for living. The washing machine and dryer take up most of the space that is also used as an entry into the house, meaning that clean clothes inevitably end up falling onto a very dirty floor and that floor is always dirty, even right after I clean it because shoes are dirty. The kitchen cupboards and counters and drawers are not a standard size. Actually, everything is double-wide sized. I could go on and on about what I hate about this house. The ugly mauve flower print on the kitchen walls. The cramped bathroom. The ugly stripe pattern on the bathroom walls. The walls themselves, which are little more than glorified car...

You ask me questions   my brain turns them over     and writes the loveliest stories          of a life I didn't live. Photo by  Hannah Jacobson  on  Unsplash   

wind singing through pines i walk alone, with nature as my companion

I can't focus. I've been sitting here for almost two hours.  I write a sentence. I delete it. I write another. I delete it also. I don't know what I want to say. Everything feels forced or dry or boring.  This is my favorite work.  Not this part specifically, where I'm sitting here unfocused and deleting everything I write because I'm judging what my fingers peck out. This part is pure torture. In this space, I feel fairly certain that I was not meant to do this work. I've convinced myself numerous times in the last hour to give it up, "it" being more than just this so-far-failed essay.  But I've been here before. This part is where I always start. Even when my thought-writing produces something brilliant, as soon as I sit down to write it out something changes and it no longer seems as worthy or important as it did in my head.  No, this is not the part I love. But it is still part of the work.  Type without judgment.  Dive deeply into descriptions...

thinking of the why's trying to understand you i can't get closer Photo by i.am_nah on Unsplash