That's the method to my madness. It hits me out of obscurity and I stop whatever it is that I'm doing, and walk straight into my office at home. There's a three minute bout of anxiety that rushes over me while my computer wakes up.
The words are coming and I can't stop them.
And then I don't stop until it's finished. It's a purge, really. I have this panicked, fevered fear that if I don't get it all out it won't come out at all. And if it did, it wouldn't be the same as I had originally intended. And the sounds won't come out right, and the words won't fit together in their perfectly jig-sawed places.
Words sit in my brain, waiting to be plucked out and used. I hear something I like and it gets stored there. More times than not, the words are thrown together in phrases; brief snippets of the possibility of a full thought. And I'll say, 'Yes, I'll use that here when I write about this.' And those phrases hover in the haze, patiently waiting their turn. They always do. And they always get one.
So this hiatus of writing has been a jumbled mess of words and phrases and topics and ideas and so many things to say that the jar became too full. And the air was vacuumed out. So opening it was a little tough. It's probably exactly as you imagine it: jar open, worms everywhere.
And I have so much to write about but the words are all pushing their way to the exit. Stampeding over each other and it's torture to get them into single-file.
I say to them, behave.
And they don't.
Because they're mine.
And I rarely behave, generally speaking.
And in that vein, I had struggled with my voice. Because I write here and here... And here is me. And there is me, plus more. And it wasn't until this weekend, and three people telling me the same thing (mostly) independently of each other, that I realized that both are me. I can be all of it at once.
So.
The crux of the hiatus, and this particular set of words, is to say that I'm here. The words are here... Good Lord, are they. And I intend to use them.
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