It’s hard enough to tell the story as it is. And yet you tell me to be honest. Well, if I’m being honest, I’d tell you that I cry every few months the way a period arrives without you asking. The way a period is literal blood and how crying also takes your whole body.
I’d tell you that your body doesn’t forget time. And that it can remember new days in the year even when you think you’ve forgotten the date. The way you put a period down to end a sentence so that a new one starts. How you always return to the end of a sentence, even if it’s a different sentence.
Or how it’s not really about the period but all the words leading up to it. All the feelings and bloating. Or maybe not even the feelings but the reason. The facts of your life that make honesty mean something different for you.
What does it mean to me? I’m tempted, instead, to give you a scene, a moment, sleeping through a Friday down Highway 5. And how every time I woke up, I saw the mountains in the distance. Or I saw rows of farmland. Or I ate this stale bagel. But maybe what you really want is the Wednesday when I woke up in the middle of the night with this feeling inside me.
But now you’ve got me thinking and I think that if I was really honest, I’d sound like a broken record. Cause here goes my day from start to finish and every morning I’m drinking my coffee and I’m turning on the computer to write this story. And I’m thinking about the same things over and over again, just like you.
Here’s an honest truth: if I could, I’d rather be an artist. Instead of making words, I’d be making things. Words are kind of like things except words holds things rather than being a thing. Words are many layers of abstraction, going from text to sound to how a series of sounds become understanding. Whereas a painting just hits you for those five seconds before you look away.
I guess the thing I want to do now is work with the stuff in front of me. Kind of like a still life, where you spend all your time looking at an assortment of objects. And it’s not really about recording it or processing it. But more like like sifting through the same sand and finding a seashell every now and then. Which, I’ll be honest, is rewarding in its own way. Cause I once found seashells in my backyard all the way in Orange County. And once I found one I couldn’t stop finding more.
Except words aren’t things. Words are more like going backwards, retracing the steps all the way back to feeling. Except sometimes these feelings come as a premonition and once I know the reason and the reason ends up being depressing, well, then I don’t want to tell you anymore.