I used to write fiction.

--From “Breaking Water” by Erica Neal

 

  “In the beginning the world was flat", Ptolemy told us. And we believed. Then Copernicus told us our land and water curved spherically onto itself. This theory defied previous logic, but we learned it to be true. Our thought is a result of our expertise at the time. And ignorance can be bliss, as so long as the bliss ultimately does not result in any significant pain or blood loss. 

     I was never one for myth, the facts seem to be more reliable allies to me. But then lies the age-old question- what do you know for sure? Empherically so, the answer truly is nothing.  And so to live like this can be a blind walk to the ends of the ocean, but fortunately for us the ocean leans back on itself, and eventually takes us to land once again.

     Their town was not on the edge of the world or even near it, it was buried under woods just miles from the interstate. It was five minutes from its exit sign and had little history that anyone knew. 

I used to be a writer.

After a long life intermission filled with change, love, marriage, children, work, and greater higher education, I have come back to myself as a writer. I have been writing and writing. Remembering how to find words.....

And rarely, but sometimes, I am seeing the moments again-the hallowed briefs in between the thoughts we have, the words we speak, and what we really mean.  And I laugh for no real reason other than just because I can still see. I really was not at all confident. So perhaps out of contrition, I am returning to a place where I think, and I read, and I write.  

Even when the day is long, because it always is, and even when the last hours before my laptop turns on my two precious children have somehow managed to suck all warm-blooded life out of me, even then I find myself compelled to try. I open one eye, then another. I drag out my ancient, reclaimed trunk from the attic, and pull out of it my history, my pieces, the mismatched bits of myself. 

And I am really not at all confidant in myself, as a writer, anymore. I was confidant at one point, or at many points in my life, I suppose. I can not much remember time before I felt myself writing either on paper or in my imagination. I find it funny that as I have become so certain of myself as an adult, a career women, a lover, and a mother, I have become less in myself as a writer. 

So I am starting this blog in order to keep a journal of sorts, to name the parts, and to meet others who can hear my voice and whose I know. I can not promise anything. And I am at once reminded of words from the American poet, Stephen Dunn:

 "Here is where loveliness can live
  with failure, and nothing is complete. 
  I love how we go on."

   
  Please join me.