Words Dancing Across My Page

So. Here I am. At Dunn Bros. Writing. Because I can.

It’s a new season, I think.

Surrounded by a babble of familiar voices I have never heard. Encased by familiar buildings I’ve never ventured within. Sipping tea and tapping my heart.
But with a new sense of purpose. A new sense of identity.

The barista said, “I can’t write.”

I answered, “oh, I’m sorry. I can’t not write.”

His co-worker laughed in complicity. He understood.

Words don’t leave me even when I’m trying to leave them. I don’t always like my words, you know. I wish they would leave me alone and let me just go on without being so pushy, forceful, demanding.

And so I’m listening to writers talk about issues and friends talk about relationships and I’m letting the words have their way. Like a wild horse let loose to run in the field.

There go the words. Free. Beautiful in their own confidence. Not as if they had ever been reined in and made to walk properly. I can almost see the wind following behind them as they frolic.

I’m really enjoying listening to the writers talk about writing. I wonder what they would say if they knew I was writing about their words, about their thoughts. I think they wouldn’t mind. After all, writers like to be heard. That’s the point of writing.

Well, maybe not the point, actually. But the impetus, the thing that pushes us to the paper. The thing that wakes us in the morning with a song suddenly waiting to be written. The thing that pushes paper to pen – whether the paper is a napkin or the back of a bulletin or a scrap tossed aside and the pen is a pencil or is black or blue or orange. The words don’t always have to be heard, but they must always be recorded, left behind.

Now the writers are discussing a poem and the memories to which it belongs. It makes me think of the bridge at Jackson Park that I just visited. I tried to explain the bridge to someone who didn’t really understand. He tried, but the connection was too ethereal, too disconnected, too much water color and not enough pen and ink.

I wonder if my words are heard like that by most people. Do they float too quickly beyond what people expect to hear? Expect to see? Do they require more definition and people don’t want to work that hard to understand? Or are the ideas and the topics too personal and don’t translate well?

I don’t know if anyone will ever want to read my ramblings, but I still can’t not write. The words live on their own and grow at their own pace.

Mostly, honestly, I do enjoy them.

Like I enjoy sitting here listening to the writers talk about writing and the friends talk about relationships and the students talk about classes while the jazz softly plays and the tea cools.

I’m a writer. And I write because I can’t not.