How do I write about what I'm not thinking about--I'm asking around it. How do I not write what I'm thinking about, but that's not quite right because it's something like how can I keep myself from writing about something in me and that's part of it, but it's not what I'm trying to say. I don't want to write about what I want to write about, what I've sat quiet thinking about for an hour and a half. I want to keep it in me because it puts me in a dangerous place, makes me close to the line that asks me to make decisions out of impatience, out of want for something that wouldn't be right right now, that I can't want right now, that wouldn't be right even if I could.
I don't know how not to write about it. I don't want to write about it, because I know that I am in a precarious place right now, and being careful about things affects more than just me, and sticking to wise is better than batting eyes at want.
So what do you do? Good question, is all I can think to say. Write about how I made it all week without Sun Drop. And how I'm twisting my ring around my finger trying to think--not of what to say, but of what else to say. Thinking about how my friend who edited my submission for the collection our seminar class is putting together, how she corrected where I used how the way I'm using it now. How grammatically it doesn't say what I'm using it to mean. My grammar is messy, and it's Southern. It's inconsistent and my comma placement is too (you see?), and so is my capitalization, italicizing, all of it. I write how I think? And it's all wrong, Chicago says. I have mixed feelings about this. I don't want to sound like I can't control this language, but there it is. There it is. I've got something. I can't control it anymore than I can control the thoughts and feelings that work their way into words. It's no wonder I'm not able to write what isn't pushing to be written, no wonder I can't even write that sentence to say what I want.
It's words and they're that vehicle, that carrier of meaning but I can't change the meaning, so everything waterfalls over that. Here's the metaphor: the stones, they're the meaning, the riverbed, and the water is rushing over and sometimes it's winding, dabbling, trickling, these words that aren't quite the right ones--the water is the words. And I'm picking up silt, or the water is, or the water's mixing in and now it's cloudy and the stones are wearing into years worth of something learned. And they don't look like what they'll look like in ten years, but already the metaphor's gone, it's lost, it doesn't work. It gets away from me, this language I can't control. Too fast, too big.
I'm trying too hard now. Thinking about wanting to lie in the river after the accident in Romania. It's forced, it's trying too hard. I don't want the ending to come, I don't want an ending that's been built to, that comes around. I don't want a good ending, I want to not make any sense at all because that's how I feel, I feel like I'm not making any sense in thinking about the line I've toed, because I've just got to turn this toward God. It's just got to be that.
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