I step out of bed and my glasses affirm that I can’t see worth a damn anymore without them, and that with them it is 3:58. And the carpet affirms that my feet sleep more persistently than me. I trudge into the living room with drowsy unanswered compulsion and this line’s running through my head from a poem written by my pseudo-intellectual college buddy: “I would stay up all night if all night I could write something beautiful.” And this line just keeps running through my head. Persistent as my feet covered with hair and sleep that yanks at nerve endings and twists them into knots that come undone and fall away and leave my feet trudging down basement stairs, barely sidestepping asbestos and not having as much luck with the dust. And I’m coughing and dreary but compelled to stop and think awhile atop boxes filled with 57 years of unexamined shit. I suddenly remember a dream that inexplicably reminds me of old happy movies, of John Wanyne, and Fred Estaire and Ginger Rogers. And then I remember what I’m there for. Somehow my typewriter finds my lap. Somehow there’s still paper in it, and somehow there is light enough to see by. It filters through oceans of dust and I am just a fish in the vastness. The line from the poem is audible for miles, and I think it is ancient like the light of stars that through the bends of space, is lost for generations. I answer it. The first words in my mind are on the paper and they are re-arranging themselves into coherent lovely phrases. Then sentences. Then paragraphs. And I can’t help but notice how eloquent I’ve become. My feet are cold and white and lonely for eachother, but I notice they are awake. And satisfied. And so am I.
I go back to bed.
Every night repeats itself in my dimly lit basement. I notice plots and sub-plots unfolding on yellow paper. In the yellow light. I have to buy more paper. There are stacks of it, now, next to the old avocado-green kitchen chair that I write in. In a year, there is a stack of papers high enough to qualify for the term, “book”. I secretly call it a book in head.
And my feet have never been more satisfied.

Labels: By Ana