No Relation Read Free Page B

gift. I like my glass half-full. I had a year’s salary, a seriously simplified love life, a lovely apartment that hadn’t been this neat and tidy … ever, a novel to write, and time on my hands. To coin a phrase,
think of this as freedom
.
    I opened my laptop on the kitchen table where I could look out the window and see the trees lining Bank Street below. The canopy of leaves dappled the June sunshine on the pavement. It was time to write. After I had surveyed the scene outside for fifteen minutes or so, I read through the file folder labelled“Debut Novel.” I had no title yet for it. Inside were files with names like “Character back stories,” “Settings,” “Chronology,” and “Basic outline.” There was also a subfolder entitled “Manuscript.” I opened the “Basic outline” file and shoved it up against the right-hand edge of my screen. Then I clicked on the “Manuscript” subfolder to reveal chapters one through eleven stacked in separate files. My mouse hovered over Chapter 11 and I double-clicked to open it. I spent the next twenty minutes or so rereading the words I had written in my last writing session a week earlier. They weren’t bad, I guess. But the prose read as I’d been feeling when I’d written it and the previous few chapters – forced, listless, unfocused, rudderless, and utterly devoid of literary merit. But that was then. Now my world had been stripped of at least two of the principal distractions that have plagued writers since words were first etched on tablets. I had no job and I had no girlfriend. Suddenly taking their place were two commodities writers have always sought but seldom found. Time and money.
    If not now, when? So I laced my fingers, turned my linked hands downward, and pushed out, stretching and cracking my knuckles in the clichéd way piano players do before duelling with the keys. I know. It must have looked lame, but it actually felt quite good. I opened a new document in Word and typed “Chapter 12.” Then I felt thirsty and got a drink. Okay, Chapter 12. Then I noticed a dustball Jenn had somehow missed in her guilt-encrusted vacuuming frenzy. I picked it up and tossed it in the garbage bin under the sink. Now, Chapter 12. I wrote a sentence. It was not a greatsentence. It was not “luminous.” It was not “elegiac” or “incandescent.” But it was a sentence. It was a start. I read it over, again and again. I flipped the front clause to the back and read it again. Then I put it back. Fifteen minutes later, like the Ministry of Truth, I backspaced through the entire sentence, eliminating any signs that it had ever existed. I looked over at my “Basic outline” for guidance, but found nothing of interest.
    Okay, Chapter 12. I shook out my arms like an Olympic swimmer just before the gun. Then I took a shower.
    Twenty minutes later I was back at my laptop feeling refreshed and enthused. Chapter 12. What’s in the fridge? No, that wasn’t a new first sentence. That was the question that I simply had to answer before trying to write that first sentence. Writing always makes me hungry. Even trying to write, or avoiding writing, or wanting desperately to write but succumbing to distractions, or falling prey to simple, pure, unadulterated procrastination, all make me hungry. I made a peanut butter and peach jam sandwich. It was very good, with the perfect proportions of peanut butter and jam. It’s hard to nail that balance. Writing and eating usually make me tired. Yep. I took a nap.
    I awoke two hours later and wondered what I was doing in bed. Then I remembered, and felt discouraged and depressed all over again. When I analyzed my post-nap feelings, I realized I wasn’t really grieving Jenn’s departure. I wasn’t a blubbering mass of emotion, but actually felt okay about it all, and was oddly motivated to get back to my novel. I was supposed to behurting, but it hadn’t hit me yet, and might never. What I did feel seemed more like relief