Where are You Going, Where Have You Been?

I have been nowhere, writing mostly in my head.

For weeks (months?) now, I have ben meaning to compose a post with a heading to the effect of “Where I’ve Been”. Obviously, I've been more thinking than posting. When I began this blogging endeavor, I was diligent and proud: Two or three posts a week, I thought. Yes, I thought, This is It. This is what I have been meaning to do. What a loving reception, I thought, What a kind audience. What a wonder, I thought, to find kindred spirits unseen, in the atmosphere of online Being. I am off to begin a novel, I boasted.

Then, I stopped blogging.

This was not planned. I had looked forward to bragging about the process; I thought I might document the development of fledgling notebook pages into readable prose I wanted to tell you about the voices that I’ve learned to listen to. I wanted to try to explain how I was learning to devote myself to them completely. How I could almost see them in front of me in a way that I have not been able to do since my imaginary friends stopped coming around some thirty-plus years ago.

Mostly, I wanted to remember. What was it that drew me to begin this project? A fragile thing, one that tends to evaporate in daylight, like vitamin D or the components of Olive Oil that make it worth buying in dark bottles. I don’t know. I only know that they became so easily lost, and that I feared that I would lose the best of myself along with them if I did not make a concerted effort to hang on. At such times, I often fantasize about what wonders I might create if I had fewer things to do: What if I lived alone, what if I was independently wealthy, or if I needed to only work part time? What if I were a kept woman; a woman of leisure, with nothing to do but lounge around in silk clothing and live in her head? I suspect that I would be quite good at such a life. But it's not mine, and this is a blessing.

[Omission here, of about 500 words composed months ago. Summary: Blah, blah blah.

We moved.]

The thing about moving that is it is very real, and has a tendency to take oneself out of

one's notebook, to be placed squarely into... well, other issues. There was packing and unpacking,

petty arguments and resolutions, calculations based on finances and lack thereof; there was the

silent clipping of coupons on Sunday mornings, and Sunday nights awake: staring at ceiling fans,

and finally, a long-awaited sigh, sounding like a gentle Okay, and an eventual return:

to notebooks and long-winded wonderings and things that are naturally, to any writer, much more

real than most of what passes for urgent.