Do I force it?
Do I yank the words to their feet when they are tired and hungry?
Do I prime the pump with docile paragraphs, cat stories for work and case studies in my neuroses?
Do I trust that the main thing is the meeting itself, woman and words, moon and sea, hour and honesty?
Do I press my face to the glass, hold my heart in a teacup, risk rejection by language itself?
The time will pass anyway. I take note of the brain fog advisory. I can see as far as my next comma.
The Divine Mercy figurine grips His heart on my desk. He can hear my prayers. He can share them with my father and grandfather, who I invoke for help with writing and living.
I make pilgrimage to their photograph. I feel certain that they are invested in this, smiling from 1986 in their DADDY and GRANDADDY T-shirts.
But my brain is bankrupt today, and dare I keep harassing the keys? How do I tell the ancient story, that riot of reassurance and reckless love, when I can’t even tell what I’m doing here?
Where does the light go when my stories go nowhere? Is there value in the vapid, some brothy nourishment when the words roll away like Spaghetti-O’s?
I write a paragraph and erase it. I hook all my highlighters together like grappling hooks.
I read the bottle of glucose tablets on my desk. The glucose copywriter is gifted beyond me. The tablets tell a story far clearer than my pudding. NATURAL GRAPE FLAVOR. CHEW COMPLETELY. CONSULT WITH HEALTHCARE PROFESSIONAL TO DETERMINE BEST SERVING SIZE.
But my eyes are bigger than my stomach, and I consult no one. I stamp my feet and dance the tarantella. I can’t see over the top of the winepress. I can’t see where this is leading. Grapes bounce off in all directions. I envy everyone who has ever been able to write in any clear direction.
I only know that I need to keep this appointment, this hairy hour of obligation. The dry creekbed reminds me that flow is gift. The burning breaking my heart reminds me that there is still fire.
The fact that I need this when it hates me tells me that love is stronger than ego.
My father wrote a secret novel, yellow legal pads filling with Finnish adventure as he jangled home on the train. What he would not speak about World War II worked up a sweat in the Winter War. The young captain aged into an author, loosing language as he’d once liberated a prison camp.
He wrote into the long night. He printed four hundred pages from his typewriter. The world would never sip this vintage wine from his heart.
My cracked and chaotic heart bleeds, and language is the tourniquet. I need to do this, even when it waterboards me. I need to do this, even if it doesn’t matter.
I belch forth proclamations that it matters, every furtive poem and awkward essay. I tell fearful friends to write without guile, exile expectation, trust that God is in it, the Word inside the words.
I believe, for them, that even if one person reads and rejoices, it has not been in vain. I believe that even if the one is the writer himself.
But do I believe it? Do I believe it for my ego when it’s doubled over in hunger, believe that my subpar striving is still a feat of soul?
If we include my mother and my big-eyed aunt, my personal essays have four readers, four electrons, four lunar orbiters circling the hoarding house of my head. My work blog has up to a thousand a day, which is terrifying and satisfying and not the point.
The meeting is the point.
This is where the sacred and profane stagger through peace talks, walking laps around language, throwing grapes into each other’s mouths. This is where past and present wrestle in the dust, throwing each other’s hips out of joint.
This is where I take life by its frayed edge and shake it like a picnic blanket, preparing a soft place to lay in the grass.
This is where I play, even when it feels like gulag toil, even when I would rather be back in 1986.
This is the February forsythia, lean and unready, bundled in my mother’s graceful arms. Forced into warmth, it will bloom. It will tell the story that winter is on the run.
I will run this course with lunatic devotion, taking the hem of story’s garment. It may be read by four or zero. It may be dreck or divine mercy. It may heal my history or fuel my fierceness.
The kingdom of love is here in the alphabet soup, and I will take it by force.
As Development Director for a cat sanctuary, Angela bears witness to mercy for all beings. She has an M.Div. from Princeton Theological Seminary and B.A. from Vassar College. Angie has lived with Type 1 diabetes for 32 years, giggles with her mother every morning, and delights in the moon. Her work has appeared or will be published in upcoming issues of The Amethyst Review, Braided Way, Feminine Collective, LEON Literary Review, MockingOwl Roost, Star 82 Review, and The Young Ravens Literary Review, among others. Angie loves life dearly.