I don’t even remember when I stopped writing. When I say writing, I don’t mean the process of learning how to draw a letter, maybe an a or a t, and taking a finger, a pen, or a keyboard, to create chains of letters and turning them into small bracelets that become necklaces which become ropes that become longer and longer until they stretch across the ocean until eventually they become what binds us together; until we fall apart. When I say writing, I don’t mean the politics section or the essays or the opinion pieces, and I certainly don’t mean 70°F and cloudy (except yesterday when I did). When I say writing, I don’t mean the process that begins with a thought and ends with ink on paper or pixels on a display that starts wars or cancels a business lunch or confesses love, or all the above in the same hour. I’ve been making bracelets and necklaces and ropes, but nothing that’s held anything together, and yet my hands are tired and my keyboards all have broken t’s and a weakened space key. But I haven’t been writing.
When I say writing, I mean the imagination of a new context, the vision of an unblemished past, the belief in a different future, and the wondering about an alternate version of us. When I speak of writing, what I mean is the thinking while forgetting to think, the letting just hands do their work, the eyes tilting to the inside, not of the head, but of the self as it churns ice cream, and simultaneously tilt to the inside of the whole world. When I say writing, I mean breathing at the same rate as a cursor blinks and a dollop of vanilla ice cream on a cone slowly melts and hits the ground, drop – by drop – by drop. It might be that in this moment, I’m inhaling again for the first time in a very long time.
