A Slight Respite

I like when the store is full of people. I lose myself in my job. It's an existence that I'm beginning to crave.

It's nighttime and I've turned out nearly all of the lights. The sign on the door says closed and I should be walking outside into the cold and locking the doors. Instead I'm sitting here at the computer wondering what in the world there is to write about. I'm tired of what used to interest me and I have a limited imagination for making something up. Usually I thrive on exaggeration. Nothing's coming and I would get up and go except I feel like I have something to learn, sitting here and typing.

Maybe I'm held here by a magical force, some kind of divine intervention, and if I broke its hold on me, I'd end up driving right into the path of a leaping deer on the highway. But just by thinking this, I've already created my own force and my own intervention. This moment will hold for a lifetime. I'll always relate things in the future back to the time when I sat here and wrote words and was aware of it.

Many of the impulses that usually govern my writing aren't present, and those that are have been mostly dismissed. I can go on without them. Right now I'm calm and not easily influenced. 'Why should I change,' is how my thoughts respond to my impulses. Nothing is entering my mind.

Except now. I'm reminded of when Liz told me that it seemed like my head never stopped whirring. This may be the slowest it's moved in a long while and I really feel quite comfortable.

I'm picturing big fields and an orange butterfly; bright, spacious log-cabins; sunlight coming through the imaginary bedroom of my eventual home. I can't wait to make my own home. Finally, the means to doing this seem less important than just doing this. I need to call a place my home. It'll have heat, and clean sheets, and a basement and some windows so that my kids can take a peek outside without taking any risks. It is at these moments, looking out windows, whether sitting backwards on the couch on their knees, or from the rear passenger seat of a car, that they can dream up how they want to be and almost watch it all come true, in the trees speeding by, right before their eyes. Hours of their days will slip past them without their knowledge and they'll never think that that might have been a bad thing.