It is November and the upstate winds run violent again.
I have had writer's block for a while now. Apart from the incomplete and unsharable blurbs that more so resemble diary entries, a children’s story I wrote about a skunk while on a plane, and essays I submit as assignments, I have grown very silent. Tongue-tied? Wordless.
Oftentimes, I write to express myself. To make sense of the world and my perceptions. Sometimes I write to get as far away from myself as possible, in the shape of a fantastical story or a foreign character. But always, I write for the sake of engaging in something authentic. Something real, stripped, and transparent. When people write to one another, through love letters or books or songs, the dense layers and walls that separate us collapse.
But now I can’t sleep without melatonin and it is getting cold again. Now I have had a cough for one month straight and can’t seem to pinpoint the problem. Now I need to do laundry and my sheets fell off my bed and they sit in this strange pile on the floor. Now there are puddles through all of my steps on the smooth gray asphalt. Now my favorite morning coffee just tastes like a stomach ache.
There is something to be said about the branch of nostalgia that does not feel nostalgic. It is more of a mourning, a state of shock, at the time that has passed and the harsh accuracy of every cliche you once ignored. It is a whiplash at the brutal impermanence of being, a heavy reflection of all of the change endured.
One minute, you fall asleep in the same bed you have always slept, smelling the same smells you have always smelled and the same sounds you have always heard. The next, you wake up in a twin sized bed in New York sandwiched between two frat houses with no grandparents, a childhood dog recently lost to a coyote attack, a first love cut short, a mother moving to Europe, a father in California, and a “house for sale” sign right around the corner.
I am excited to write about happy things soon. To start writing comedy again, soon. Adventures, soon. New beginnings, soon. The changing of the seasons, soon. When the winds mellow out, soon. When the coffee tastes sweet, soon. When the puddles dry up, soon. None of us are exempt from the ending of beautiful things. I am excited to write about the beautiful things.
But now I am going to go do my laundry.