It’s hard to believe that almost two months have slipped by.
When I transferred stores in February, I told people, “I’m not going to make any decisions for thirty days. I’ll observe, and listen a lot, but no big decisions for thirty days.”
In the one therapy session I’ve had in the last eight weeks, she said, “And maybe you can extend that gentleness to your writing too. If you don’t write or work on The Book everyday, maybe it can be okay. Call it an acclimation period.”
Thirty days went longer than thirty days.
Today, I faced myself. I had the day off, which is not the norm for me on a Friday, and I told C yesterday that I had to get back to writing.
This morning, I did everything to negate that promise I made to myself. I lingered in bed with V, then I read a book, then I took a shower, then I went to Target, then I drove thirty minutes because I had to have lunch at the particular sushi place that I hadn’t been to in over a year. I ate slowly. Reading a book with one hand, and poking rolls around with chopsticks in my other hand.
Finally, the lights and music went off. It was time for the restaurant to close, as they do between lunch and dinner service. Naturally, as a person wasting time is wont to do, I was completely oblivious.
It took the lights going off for me to say, Okay, the jig is up. Time to write.
I took my laptop to the Starbucks adjacent to the sushi place, found a seat with a window view, and cued up “Wait For It” from the Hamilton soundtrack.
I hadn’t worked on the book in weeks. I stared at the blinking cursor, in the paragraph where I’d left off. The last time I’d written, I’d not had a good writing day. I remembered that. Getting through paragraphs was like walking through tar. I had slammed the laptop shut and gone to work, and hadn’t ironed over it again since.
I read over what I wrote that day. Not that bad, considering it had felt like pulling teeth. I corrected a few things, and started a new paragraph. Resistance set in as I waited for the rust, for the clunky phrases and working through thoughts like thick glue.
Instead, my fingers flew. It was all right there, just waiting. And it came right back. I wrote for an hour like that, blissfully, until it was time to go home.
I should’ve started earlier, I thought to myself, scolding.
Sometimes, it’s not falling off the wagon, despite how I may beat myself up during lapses in productivity.
Sometimes, it’s just pressing the pause button, and everything I left is still poised, ready to begin again.
(By the way, everything else is fine too. I am slowly acclimating to work, V is great, C is too.)
small life, slow life 