Sometimes when I write, writer appears.

Recently I was writing. Hand, pen moving.

I had forgotten that I was a writer. Things were going perfectly well.

Then a question was written, and a slight off-ness about it was felt. So I wrote I sense this question isn’t right.

As this was written, a little flare of excitement was felt. A small grab toward what had been written. Instead of writing from it, attention looked at it.

The beginning of a someone. A small, quick movement that felt like this is mine.

The feeling something could be had, done.

When this was noticed it was followed by the same movement. The feeling of a someone who had noticed all this.

I note this with pen, and as I do, the image of a desert comes to mind. Half dune, half sky, and windy. Strong enough to gather the sand and blow it everywhere.

Then, something tips and, out of what was diffuse, the shape of a face forms.

Ah, so writer is a face, and writing is the wind gathering it.

I put the notebook away and have been thinking about this since, because sometimes writer is nowhere to be found, sometimes writer is useful, and sometimes writer feels like pressure.

The feeling there is only this face, and the trying to organize everything around it.

Writer, gathered by experience, begins to feel it’s doing the gathering.

I take a walk, but I’m just looking around for meaning.
I make a meal, but it’s rushed and I drop things.
I read an email because I’m afraid if I don’t I’ll miss something.

I sit out on the deck. It seems nothing useful is coming from the notebook lately. By now I think I should be upset, so I grab a book instead.

A chapter in, I notice my upper body. There’s tension. It’s interesting because reading a book doesn’t necessitate it.

I see it. The writer, leaning toward the book as though it’s there to give her something. It softens.

Reading.
For a moment.

And sometimes a face.

If you’d like to read as new pieces arrive, you can subscribe.

—

Related Reading:

No Other Place — What’s left when there’s nowhere else to be.

Touching Ground — The long way back to here.

Subscribe now

When I was little there was a pine tree in the front yard. One day I came out from underneath it, walked to the front steps of our house and rang the doorbell.

My mother answered. I walked in and told her I had just been saved.

I remember only her face.

The smile that said:

Kate, yes.

I wasn’t more than five or six. I knew trees, but I had no idea what saved meant. I knew it was a word that mattered to adults. But I had no way of touching it.

My words had reached her face.

And in this way, her yes became my own.

—

Over time, this yes was hard to live.

It was like a dream, one in which I urgently needed to be somewhere. My feet move. But when I look down, I see they won’t touch the ground. I can’t grasp the physics. Something holds me aloft.

Recently I read this, from Helen Keller:

“The few signs I used became less and less adequate, and my failures to make myself understood were invariably followed by outbursts…I felt as if invisible hands were holding me, and I made frantic efforts to free myself. I struggled—not that struggling helped matters…”

A lump forms in my throat.

Effort that doesn’t arrive anywhere.

It only becomes more effort.

—

When I started reading Robert Saltzman’s work, I hadn’t been in a church for twenty years. I lived habitually from the structure of one, but I couldn’t see this.

It had become my physics. Experience was a constant pull away from itself. An unquestioned effort to get somewhere else.

One of the first things I noticed about Robert was that he used words differently. I didn’t understand everything he said, but what I could understand had one characteristic. It pointed to things I could find in my experience, here.

Because I was encountering Robert through language, I became curious about my own. I’d go for a walk and notice my thoughts. Sit at the dinner table and find myself listening to what I was saying.

What I eventually saw was language that didn’t move with the moment.

It moved preoccupied by a story about Kate that had been decided long ago. A story that kept telling the same Kate into being.

Once I could hear this, and feel the tension of it in my body, something began to change.

In brief moments, what was now and what was said about it touched.

Dovetailed.

—

I am walking into the store. List running through my head.

I notice a young couple a few steps ahead. She’s in pink shorts and a white tee.

He’s in dirty, orange-brown Carhart overalls.

A beat later, a thought—

They should really ban overalls.

A small tension forms in the chest.

My footsteps quicken.

Then another thought—

Overalls, worn.

Chest opens.

Feet slow.

Sight widens.

People.

Cars.

Husband.

Heat from afternoon sun off blacktop.

A step, and another.

Fingers intertwined.

If you’d like to read as new pieces arrive, you can subscribe.

—

Related Reading:

No Other Place — There is no place outside ordinary experience from which life can finally be understood.

The Layer Between — Standing one step removed from life, and noticing that distance fall away.

Where Words Come From — Words appear, then the sense of a separate writer arrives.

If you’re new here, and came by way of Robert Saltzman’s post, welcome.

This means you took the time to read some or all of a long correspondence between Robert and me. I find that remarkable, and want to thank you for taking the time.

When I reread the conversation myself, I noticed a couple of things across its arc. What stood out helps me understand more about how I write.

The first is that something, slowly, reorganized.

That alone was enough.

But there’s something else that’s a little more specific. I can see now that the particular questions I was living inside organized the world I lived in, which means they also organized what I noticed.

For a long time, I thought the most important questions centered around becoming the right kind of person. My old notebooks are full of questions that circled around right and wrong, thoughts predicated on improvement. I couldn’t yet see those questions had already decided what I was and what kind of world I lived in.

Because I kept seeing certain things about myself as wrong, I remained a problem to be solved in the future. And, so long as the questions didn’t change, I kept getting more of the same.

Until one small thing started to happen.

When I sat down to write, I found myself turning toward the questions themselves.

Often, in my exchanges with Robert, a memory would emerge. The first time I came across, in a book:

Check everything against your own experience.

When I’d read that it seemed quietly radical to me. I was also certain I had to be taught what it meant.

Robert never gave me anywhere else to go, never suggested there was anything to learn. So, I began, instead, to look through these eyes, pay attention to these ears, feel this body. At the same time, thought did its thought-ing, offering up its objections. This is a last resort.

And yet, slowly, something became obvious.

There is no other place but this experience.

As that settled in, the need for it to be different no longer seemed quite so compelling.

This brings me to how I write.

I might start with a question or an idea. I might start with an ordinary scene in which something is noticed. Either way, the two must inform each other.

I’ve no use for ideas that live only in abstraction.

I need to see what they look like lived. I need to see whether they hold true to experience.

Sometimes, when they do, something reorganizes.

In the language of daily life.

That’s where my essays begin.

Thanks again for being here.
Onward,
Kate

Related Reading:

Before I Arrive — A few ordinary seconds without the usual center.

The Layer Between — When watching stops and something comes closer.

The Place I Run To — Open, then narrowing. The move back to safety.

Subscribe now

Most often it’s already there.

In writing. Talking. Walking.

A slight forward lean.
Wrinkling between the eyes.
Searching for something—an answer to a question I wasn’t aware of asking.

Not distant—
more like posture,
an assumed face.

The layer between.

—

I watch.

Not what’s being done—
but myself, doing.

From up, and back here.
A slight distance from everything else.

A watch tower.

—

As if this is the only way to manage things.

Don’t the writing, talking, walking already happen on their own?

—

Just the other afternoon—
a moment the watching dropped.

At the end of a long walk.
It had started to rain.

Home now, we finished talking under the carport.

Words still came
though it had gone.

The sound of rain and the conversation held.

—

Watching has its companion questions.

Am I okay?

Am I doing this right?

And another thing—
a fragmenting, a sense of at least two.

Up in here, looking.

An out there.

—

Under the rain,
that drop.

His face—

instantly closer.

A flutter in the chest followed.

Then—

the thought:

fascinating.

—

One word.

And, just like that, someone, again, watching,

who keeps finding it this way.

If you’d like to read as new pieces arrive, you can subscribe.

—

Related Reading:

The Place I Run To — Open, then narrow. The move back to safety.

It Comes After — A moment where sequence happens without anyone running it.

Standing On A Stool — The moment a position drops, and the room rearranges.

Subscribe now

Bent over the page, writing.

Bird and house sounds.
Light in soft, gray lines across white desk.
A gripped feel to the chest.

Movement, pen across paper,
and a me
doing the moving.

Isn’t it obvious I make this happen?

Two is how it seems.

—

Near the end of the second page,
attention shifts on its own.

Away from the making of words toward:
where do they come from?

Now there is seeing
in reverse—

—

First
it’s not nothing,
and it’s also not something.

A faint stirring before it can be named stirring.

A word emerges on its own.
And another.

Pen moves, tracks.

Black marks
appearing on white paper.

A voice, internal, mine,
says what’s written.

The same sequence, again.

Not two, me-plus-creation-of-words.

More like a process.

Cars of an endless train.

—

There is a little shock, a pause.
A looking up.

As if to make sure nothing in the room
is different.

Mine, me, I, I’m writing, my hand, my words: results of the experience.

Cars, not engine.

Then, writing again.

Words keep coming.

And Writer—later than it was thought—
moves along with them.

If you’d like to read as new pieces arrive, you can subscribe.

—

Related Reading:

Before I Arrive — Before anything becomes me

Off The Tree — A steady succession of I’s

It Comes After — What forms, then gets named

Subscribe now

Waking.

No room yet.
No me.

Just—
something completely undefined.
Not nothing—activity.
Not something formed by language either.

Then
like searching.

And like trying to swim
toward a surface.

A decided direction.

This moves first.

Then,
words.

They’re faint at first.

Like hearing talk from another room.

Or trying to tune a radio frequency from static.

They become questions, forming.

Where is this.
What time.
What day.

Monday.

A recognition—yes.
Click.

Monday—yes,
the day I lift weights.

And with that,
I feel myself arrive, organized.

Click again.

Awake.

—

A few seconds.

Seen a handful of times.

Before I arrive,
something is already there.

Alive.
Un-orientable.

Then it’s
felt as too much.

Whatever this is
right before I am.

Whatever this is.

It tells me I am and, also, I am not.

If you’d like to read as new pieces arrive, you can subscribe.

—

Related Reading:

Off The Tree — A steady succession of I’s.

Wearing It — Something already taken as me.

It Comes After — What forms, then gets named.

Subscribe now

This is noticed, about a kind of knowing.
I walk outside, check the box for mail.
Words did not get me there.
I fry the eggs, flip them when it’s time.
No one tells me when.
I sit at the table, a meal with my family.
No one need introduce themselves, tell me how to use the fork.
To write about these moments, this kind,
requires only precision.

—

Or, sometimes it begins with a kind of kindling.
Pull, desire, activity, heat. In the head, chest, throat.

Need.

For what?

The satiety
of being someone
with a place to land, stand.

Someone who knows.

Words, like matches, meet the oxygen of the moment.
Gathering. Holding. Struck. Flame.

A way simple precision isn’t.

If you’d like to read as new pieces arrive, you can subscribe.

—

Related Reading:

The Pull To Conclude — The moment something tries to become final.

It Comes After — The description arrives behind what already happened.

Down — A few seconds where nothing is yet placed.

Subscribe now

Sometimes language is sticky.

Words, spoken or thought, remain.
Replayed, rehashed, reacted, redone.

Not so much in the room
as in the body.

Checking.
Holding.
Checking again.

Why do words that come

not go?

—

Other words pass right through.
Not slippery, just nothing to grab them.

Said, and no
again.

Not forgotten—
just not carried any further.

Who, then, would do the holding?

If you’d like to read as new pieces arrive, you can subscribe.

—

Related Reading:

A Loop About A Loop — A question turns, then turns again.

The Pull To Conclude — The moment a loop tries to close.

The Horizon Keeps Rearranging — We never quite reach the horizon.

Subscribe now

It’s morning. Eyes open.

Already
something is in place.

Not thought.
Or said.

More like this:
a pair of glasses
not felt as worn.

—

A quick inventory.
Across the room,
up, down, over.

Bedroom.
Light from behind curtains.
Walls, ceiling, closet door.

Nothing is absent.

But something is there—
a not this.

The same, ordinary me.

—

Body moves.
Up. Out.

Feet take up the searching now.

For what is not clear.

Only:
not here
not this.

—

It’s immediate.
Hard to see arrive.

More like waking into it
than watching it form.

—

But
not every morning.

Some mornings are
nothing like this.

No scanning.
No ache in the chest.
No sense of ordinary, wrong.

Nothing absent then either.

—

So what is this
taken as me,
true,
already known
as not right
before anything was ever said?

If you’d like to read as new pieces arrive, you can subscribe.

—

Related Reading:

It Comes After — Meaning and importance arrive in the review.

Down — Noticing how things get placed “somewhere.”

The Pull To Conclude — The moment a feeling settles into something true.

Subscribe now

It was ordinary.
In the bathroom.
Sound of water running, smell of soap, morning light.

Then
a brief focusing: up, in.
Something wandering, caught.

—

It moves like a sequence, almost.
Four.
Counting comes in looking back, after.

—

It wasn’t the what of it,
it was the way it moved.

—

Next,
a slight jolt.
To say that
is already too much.

—

And that’s it.
Clean.
Something like matter-of-fact.

—

Now:
I go back,
use more words.
In parts.
Small, sequential beats.
One thought,
stitched together,
done by itself.
A structure.

Then
the sense:
undeniably automatic.
It lands quickly.
Fits.

And with it
the sense of importance.
But even this
comes after.

—

These words aren’t wrong,
just approximate.

The moment itself had no narration.
No this means this.

Just
that.

—

Hot water still running.
Steam. Fan. Body.

—

What remains:
To say “seen”
doesn’t quite land.

“Felt,”
not that either.

“Important”
only comes with the review.

Then—
a pull to settle it:
no one there, no doing, only done.

It holds.

—

Or,
something moving.
Words arriving last.

If you’d like to read as new pieces arrive, you can subscribe.

—

Related Reading

The Pull To Conclude
When certainty closes the hand.

Standing On A Stool
A position forms. Then something loosens.

A Loop About A Loop
A question interrupts what was already happening by itself.

Subscribe now

It’s night, lying awake in bed.
Eyes still closed.

A faint, gentle buzzing.

Then something else, quick.
A flick.

The eyes, maybe.
Turn of the head, almost.

A small movement
meaning: down, foot.

—

After the flick,
the buzzing is still there.

But it isn’t down.
Not far either.

No longer “my foot” and,
strangely, nowhere else in particular.

Just gentle sensation
in no place.

Here.

—

Once, I read about sight,
surgically given,
after a life of blindness.

Right after, eyes saw only
what the seeing call brightness,
color,
motion.

No distance
or depth.

Rooms were not rooms.
Down the street was
just right here.

—

Later, sitting at my desk.

A thought appears.
Light.
Quick.

Where?

There’s placement:
“in here.”

—

But this is not always the case.

Another day, standing in front of the mirror.
A different thought comes—
hovers,
as easily placed in front of the face
as behind it.

Still a kind of upwardness,
but no inside, no center.

—

Foot.
Thought.

Both arrive
already seemingly placed
on a map.

But watching closely—
placing happens.

Mapped, then…

—

A flick.
A muscular turn.
A wordless assigning.

Without these
buzzing
is just buzzing.

A thought
just appears.

The map goes wobbly.

—

Those first moments of sight—

many new seers said no, closed their eyes.

Too much?
Or, perhaps, no familiar way
to hold it all.

—

Sometimes
there’s just this.

Not located.
Nothing missing either.

If you’d like to read as new pieces arrive, you can subscribe.

—

Related Reading

What Does Any of That Have to Do With This
Sometimes ideas have nothing to do with what’s now.

Standing On A Stool
A position forms. Then something loosens.

The Place I Run To
Open, then narrowing. The move back to safety.

Subscribe now

.

Things have been learned here.
I am a soul, working out eternity.
There is no self.
Your self can, must be 10x’d.

I find myself walking today.
Heel, toe.
Air into the lungs, then out.
Arms know what to do.

What does any of that have to do with this?

nothing answers.

Sometimes a companion walks alongside.
An unquestioned feeling—
I am not okay.

This, it seems, might have to do with all that.

If you’d like to read as new pieces arrive, you can subscribe.

—

Related Reading

• The Pull To Conclude — When language tightens around the need to stabilize.

• The Place I Run To — On the narrowed center that feels like safety.

• Off the Tree — A steady succession of I’s.

Subscribe now

When I return to these words,
there is a pull to make them conclude.

Conclusion is a noun.
Does that make it a thing?
Have you ever held one in your hand?

We are graspers.
It’s the thumbs, they say.

We don’t see objects,
we see what they’re for.
The brain moves ahead,
mapping how things will fit in the hand.

Held.
Where to go, what to do.

I’ve never held a conclusion.
But I know the feeling.

Certainty.
A kind of endorphin.
Chest lifts.
Feet ground.
Hands ready.

Or softer:
sit back.

Curiosity fades.
Nothing left to reach for
when something is known.

Conclusion does the holding.

So I want to conclude.
Who doesn’t want to know
what all this is?

To settle.

Life is a noun.
So am I.
But I won’t.

If you’d like to read as new pieces arrive, you can subscribe.

—

Related Reading

The Chisel and The Level
Precision appears when the one shaping the words softens.

Standing On A Stool
A position forms. Then something loosens.

The Place I Run To
Open, then narrowing. The move back to safety.

Subscribe now

The other morning,
this.

Sitting outside,
coffee in hand.

A boy, maybe five,
walks past.

He is play,
entranced,
free, whole.

His open face looks up,
catches my eye.

Freezes.

He narrows.
Runs back to his mother.

Caught.

One becomes two.
Safety.

Mind takes a snapshot.
Remember this.

—

Writing this now,
the boy returns.

Connection,
in a flash.

I do it too.

Myself,
open, then freezing, returning.

Not to another person,
but to my head.

To narrowness.

As if the world,
and my body in it,
are too much.

Too large, too wild, too open.

I run back.

Safety,
this narrowed center.

The world.
And me, looking out.

—

Sometimes
there is venturing.

Moments,
unthought, here and there.

The warmth of water
running down the back.

The full taste
and texture
of food in the mouth.

Not listening to birds,
but becoming hearing itself.

—

Then
caught,
frozen,

I run back.

—

To my head.

The narrow place.

Not unseen,
just small enough
to stand apart again.

—

If you’d like to read as new pieces arrive, you can subscribe.

Related Reading

If this piece resonated, you might also like:

• The Circling Forms a Center — Sometimes the creek disappears.

• A Loop About A Loop — A question interrupts.

• The Chisel and the Level — Two pages in, the “I” disappeared.

After a storm, I walk beside the creek.

The new swell of water transforms. Submerging banks. Brown-white currents rushing. Louder now. Even the bridges look lower.

Most enchanting is how the water carries whatever it has snatched from upstream — colorful wrappers, sticks and leaves riding the current. Once, a plastic stool. Another time a pink stroller. Someone’s garbage bin. A beach ball on its way to the ocean.

Becoming fascination itself, I walk.
A kid again. Wonder.

Right now an orange pail hangs by its handle from a tree branch.

An odd ornament.
The remainder of the storm.

Eyes widen at the brightness.

Some days I hardly notice the creek.

Those are the days my head is full of its own weather.

There was a morning, just after waking, when I noticed something curious.

If experience flows like a creek, mine was flowing unusually easy.

Perched inside myself, I watched for a while. Perspective panoramic. The moment’s ingredients — sensing, thinking, feeling, meaning — coming and going.

Nothing caught for long. No obvious center to grab onto.

Just hmmm, there is this.
And hmmm, now this.

When the creek floods, I never think it should be some other way.

Debris — the evidence of us.

A different morning I wake up and there it is.

The old, familiar anvil in the center of my chest.

Everything narrows around it. The center thickens. Ache and uncertainty lodge there like the garbage bin — waterlogged, mud-packed, stuck.

Thought rushes brown — up, over, around.

There is only this.

That easy morning stopped flowing with a single thought.

An afternoon conversation. A face I couldn’t read.

The ache of not feeling understood.
Words replaying, taking over.

A flick of hot embarrassment — the signal that sticks.

The thought loops a dozen times.

Perhaps it isn’t thought that slows a creek.

It’s the circling.

Mostly, Sand Creek meanders thin. Its surface quiet, like a mirror with nothing to say about its reflection.

I walked it recently on that kind of day and noticed I barely saw the creek for all the chatter circling in my head.

Until something orange caught my eye.

A small bucket hanging by its white handle from a low branch.

An odd ornament.

The creek, again.

—

If you’d like to read as new pieces arrive, you can subscribe.

Related Reading

If this piece resonated, you might also like:

• A Loop About A Loop — A question interrupts.
• Off The Tree — A steady succession of I’s.
• The Horizon Keeps Rearranging — We never quite reach the horizon.

I write short literary essays from inside ordinary life.

I begin with a scene or an idea that keeps asking something of me. I write until the words feel faithful to the experience.

Sometimes that’s all that happens.

Sometimes something quietly reorganizes.

If you’d like a place to begin, start here:

A Loop About A Loop — A question turns, then turns again.

The Circling Forms a Center — Attention circles. A world forms around it.

Standing on a Stool — In the middle of conflict, something loosens.

Off The Tree — A steady succession of I’s.

The Horizon Keeps Rearranging — The horizon keeps moving too.

If you'd like to keep reading, you're welcome to subscribe.

New pieces are published when they’re ready.

Subscribe now

What’s forming now?

Sometimes it’s too crowded to see.
Sometimes it’s movement, clear.

A ferris wheel dropping off new characters every time it reaches the bottom.

The One Who Seeks.
The One Who Made This Dinner.
The One Who Must Fix Silence With Conversation.

I read the following exchange:

Monk: What happens when the leaves are falling and the trees are bare?
Unmon: The golden wind, revealed!

I lean forward.

Without a word—
I know that tree.
I’ve seen this wind take the leaves.

Then—the crowd begins to speak.

I should write something.
Hurry, get it down.
This is good, it will lead somewhere.
I understand what it means.

Each a leaf.

Falling. Joining colored wind.

If there is an exit from this, I haven’t found it.

The realization aches.

Seeker.
Writer.
The One Who Needs Fixing.

A steady succession of I’s.

Golden.

What’s forming now.

The exchange is a Zen koan attributed to Yunmen (Unmon).

—

If you’d like to read as new pieces arrive, you can subscribe.

Related Reading

If this piece resonated, you might also like:

• A Loop About A Loop — A question interrupts.
• The Circling Forms a Center — Some days the creek disappears.
• The Chisel and the Level — Two pages in, the “I” disappeared.

I wonder if this is what it’s like to be in a duel.

We stood across from each other in the basement, each front-facing. Each trying to be a little taller. Eyes narrowed, scanning for vulnerable places.

The place I stood was named: Mom.
Firm. Leveraged. A point to make. The push of responsibility at my back.
The words I spoke came from there.

Then, a small internal shift. I don’t know why.

First, a split second of fear — like stepping onto a lower-than-expected stair.

Instead of falling, vision widened. The whole scene came into focus.

I stopped telling and began taking her in. Listening. Waiting. Only then responding.

The weapon loosened in my hand. Words stopped trying to prove.

Nothing resolved.

Walking upstairs, I realized something more valuable had happened.

I hadn’t missed her.

—

This time, the kitchen.

A hurt unnamed. The impulse to place it squarely on his shoulders.

Different room. Same duel-stance. Another name: Wife.

Words forming to secure my position.

Then again — a small shift. Fear. Widening.

Listening took the lead. Speech followed when it was my turn.

No score kept. No verdict delivered.

Just two people saying what was true.

Closer somehow — not because we agreed.

—

Sometimes I recognize when a position is being used like a stool.

Mom. Wife. The one who knows. The one who is aggrieved.

There’s a feeling to it — effort. The scramble for footing.

Without height, the world insists, we lose control.

But when footing is allowed to give way, something curious happens.

A split second of fear — as if stepping somewhere unfamiliar.

Then dilation. The eyes adjust.

Ah. Familiar ground.

What’s foreign is entering it without force.

Attention widens. Listening sharpens. Speech aligns. Distance begins to close.

No one monopolizing the exchange. Yet nothing unraveling.

I wonder how much of what I once called advantage
was only the precarious footing of a stool —
when life may have arranged itself all along.

—

If you’d like to read as new pieces arrive, you can subscribe.

Related Reading

If this piece resonated, you might also like:

• The Horizon Keeps Rearranging — We never quite reach the horizon.
• A Loop About A Loop — A question interrupts.
• The Circling Forms a Center — Some days the creek disappears.

Two pages into a notebook, the “I” disappeared.
That firm center of experience dissolved.
The Writer — the one demanding sentences shape into a result — exited.

Writing continued.
Pen-as-chisel stopped trying to make something happen.
In its place, a small level.
To place gently against experience.

The bubble centers. Or it doesn’t.
I met precision when myself left.

For months, in the same notebook, I keep tripping over the word “I.”
I. Me. Myself. My self. My Self.

English requires a subject.
Experience doesn’t always have one. I don’t know what to call it when it doesn’t.

I won’t claim there is no self.

Some days the Writer is there, solidified, leaning forward, gripping the chisel, shaping the sentence.
Less and less though.
This is how the system regulates right now.

But sometimes it all eases.
Chisel-grip loosens.
Level rests cleanly against experience.
If the words are precise, the bubble settles.

Press publish and reliably the controlling Writer wakes.
Chest tightens.
Thought: better with the chisel?

Level sits quietly on the desk.

—

If you’d like to read as new pieces arrive, you can subscribe.

Related Reading

If this piece resonated, you might also like:

• Off The Tree — A steady succession of I’s.
• A Loop About A Loop — A question interrupts.
• Permission — I thought I needed permission to write.

We’d walk, talk.

A pattern taking shape through young questions asked on city sidewalks, lamplit streets, paths through parks. Love, it seemed, was giving each other our best answers.

By our third house we started walking to the lake. That’s when it changed. We’d choose a bench, watch the water pointlessly shift with the wind. He noticed how tired I was. I noticed him strained. The questions were harder to shape, the answers no longer satisfying.

We had arrived. Small classic Georgian Colonial. Safe and leafy, geometric neighborhood. Healthy kids. Success in business. That bench held the weight of what couldn’t be ignored. The water never once told us how.

We never quite reach the horizon. Recently we drove from the Appalachian Mountains through Georgia Piedmont to the Atlantic Coastal Plain. The horizon kept rearranging itself.

There is a stretch before the coast. It’s flat, pine-forested, dotted by lonely marshes. That day winter-brown, scrubby. Here the horizon gapes. Wide, harsh, uncomfortably empty of people.

Then, Savannah — alive, inhabited, unexpected.

The house went. In a single day we sold its contents, leaving one box for the thrift store. Then we traveled for a long while, zigzagging a way as we went. A new pattern emerged, uncomfortable, annoying at first. We’d walk, talk. A question. Then only: we’ll see.

Returning from Savannah, the land shifts back. It begins flat. Marshes give way to pine, pine to red clay, red clay to where our life is now. The horizon keeps rearranging.

—

If you’d like to read as new pieces arrive, you can subscribe.

Related reading

If this piece resonated, you might also like:

• Standing on a Stool — In the middle of conflict, something loosens.
• A Loop About A Loop — A question interrupts.
• Permission — I thought I needed permission to write.