“We start with a quick montage.”
There are times when a montage of my life would have been interesting. When it might have cut from a dimly lit restaurant to Central Park at dusk, a plane landing in Central America, date after date after date, manuscript pages getting stacked on one another fresh from a printer, a concert packed with people, the hall of mirrors at Versailles, laughing in a bar, laughing in a park, laughing anywhere.
A friend of mine tells me her grandmother told her, you need to write down everything that’s happening. That felt overwhelming to her until she wrote down just specific things, concrete daily items. Here, a list of a few of those things in my life: three chigger bites on my stomach, a dusting of flour on our white countertops, a sign that says help us trim our roses next to a perfectly appointed white picket fence, me asleep on the couch, me asleep in bed, me asleep for longer than I’ve ever slept as an adult, the bright green grass of the graveyard, me kissing B in a park off the highway, my white Keds walking the street around my neighborhood again and again, the loops so rote they must be worn in the soles by now.
Writing cannot make this more interesting. Writing, which has been the antidote to boredom for so long now, twenty-three years to be exact, does not seem able to make this interesting and that feels like a loss of the only superpower I have ever had.
Last night I watched a concert my friend put on Facebook Live. He played John Prine and Guy Clark and Turnpike Troubadours. He wore a cowboy hat and a big belt buckle and a western shirt. He was in an apartment in Brooklyn and kept trying to show us the sunset though it never quite came through the screen. It made me cry and cry and cry, that concert. I wanted to be able to feel the sound waves in the air, I wanted to be able to go up after the show and hug him, touch his face, say thank you with my voice, not through small typed letters.
During the show, my friend sang a cover of the John Prine song, “My Darlin’ Hometown.” In his beautiful voice he sang, a familiar old picture it seems, and I'll go there tonight in my dreams. I have never heard a more compelling reason for sleep.
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