I didn’t just write at red lights, I wrote at green lights and on the downtown straightaway. At 50mph, 45, 35 winding my island – county highway 56 – two quiet lanes. Around neighborhood turns and slow through the school zones. In the crosswalk, the parking lot. With one eye on the road and one eye on the kids, and eyes in my hand navigating the words and the paper. All my eyes in focus.
I watched from the inside of my head, observing right side and wrong side up and down and inside out observing to understand. Allowing the paper, the ink, the lines strewn and crossing – do the sorting – add layers to the sense making.
Light flashing focus. Kids on the neighborhood elementary school basketball court rolling on skates – no, men bouncing hoops at dusk – no, they are all the same blur of childhood passing through the power lock windows with pencil and paper and business task lists scrubbed like an art project over the texture of steering wheel vinyl.
I wrote while talking to people on their bicycles who didn’t notice my busy hands through the roll down windows, with kids telling me to stop watch out pay attention. Up the sides and around the paper borders when I ran out of space – I could always find space. Full over spilling organization brain rushing space made for me to fit in. I wrote the how to. I wrote the plan, the budget, the operating protocol, training manuals and annual projection variants. Behind the wheel I wrote solutions and strategies, thank you emails and confrontation letters.
Ultimately I learned to write with my voice into a recorder, and to be okay with the sound of that voice and the many places my voice came from. I learned to pull over when it got too dark, and the other headlights too bright. On the shoulder, in the bus stop lane, the empty grass lots in the weeds and mud puddles I kept going. When I did pick up the phone, I doodled in the margins, moving, my hand unstoppable.
Later, years or days or hours, scribbled on the backside of utility bills and junk mail envelopes, on forgotten shopping lists torn with wrinkles rumpled and water stained I’d type it all out,
Here.
Gouging for the good bits, the entrails
Purging purging
Here
Here I am, now, still
Writing after I stopped. Writing on go. Filling in history.
