Over the past few days I had been unusually pissed off and ungrateful. Overwhelmed. Spread thin. Unappreciated. Frustrated. Exhausted. Unable to concentrate. Judgmental. Hard on myself.
It isn’t that I don’t have the time to write. I’m just too distracted. I have been working with a character I love but whom I know nothing about. I have been building her up in my head for years, calling her out to play whenever I had the time, and saddling her with scenes and memories here and there, but haven’t so much as tried to take her out to lunch. It’s been rude of me and so she’s been resentful. She will not come out when I beckon her anymore. I’m always thinking about a million other things, or trying to force this girl to land on the paper like a cat.
Last month, during the residency, my mentor suggested I read a poem every day, like a vitamin for breakfast. I immediately wrote off this idea, as I had long ago dismissed poetry as hokey and sort of chaotic — in general, not really for me — but I had mostly been reading bad poetry back then. Then my poet-friend Bee posted this so I went out and bought a whole book of women poets that featured, in particular, Habitation, by Margaret Atwood. And then I started writing poetry again.
Not because I am any good at it; in fact only because I am not good at it. Because I need to learn how to have fun writing again. To have fun at least some of the time. To let myself fail and be able to say, hey that wasn’t so terrible and I’m still alive, and nobody in my writing program even saw that! It’s a good exercise and, in a perverse way, builds some confidence.
It gets better incrementally, but I still need to take my character out on a date.
In other news, Huz linked up with a homie from childhood whom he hadn’t seen in over a decade. This makes him want to work on his music again — while Hugga is in preschool we spend mornings in the office, making love with our backs to each other and giving birth to new babies before we get back to the bedroom — and has also led him to tell me about past exploits which either turn me on immensely or hurt in that deep, appetite-losing way like when we first started dating, I can’t really decide. Imagining Huz before we knew each other — or without me at times we weren’t dating — excites me, but I can be a masochist in that way. But that being said, I’ve never been more attracted to my husband, even though I’d been feeling inexplicably threatened by this new development in his life.
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