Laurustina

and halfway through, you realize that there is no way you can send what you’ve just written to the person you were writing it to.  You start to hit delete and then you look at it, like six or seven paragraphs, and you don’t want to just toss it because  - oh hell, i don’t know why – maybe because its the first six or seven paragraphs you’ve been able to string together in weeks, or because it feels like the truest (and by that i mean scariest) thing you’ve written in ages, or maybe it just feels like if you delete it you are wishing it away and half the point of writing it was to unburden yourself of the weight of those words, of the shame and fear and all that baggage that comes along with them, and so you think that at the very least you should save them SOMEWHERE. For me, that somewhere used to be and is still occasionally HERE. If I don’t think better of it by morning, maybe I’ll tuck those words in here for safekeeping tomorrow. Then again, maybe not.

I just finished reading “The House on Mango Street” and couldn’t help but think … now where did i leave those Villa Stories?

wow. wierd. I haven’t been here in a while. Back in November, when I was writing every day, I got into this mindset of writing first thing in the morning, but way back in the day, when I wrote all the time, I did much of it at night. Now I don’t, and I don’t really know why. Maybe its because my hands hurt by the end of the day, or I got so used to my hands hurting by the end of the day that I just stopped even considering writing at night. And now that Mouse and I share this computer, we trade off a lot at night, so I haven’t fallen into an evening writing groove. But blah blah blah … all of that is really just a long-winded way to say that it feels weird to be here now, and it reminds me of the Capitola years, when Mr. J. and I spent our evenings on opposite sides of that big bedroom upstairs in that tiny condo, when my desk was set up on the built-in vanity which meant that all evening I sat at the computer facing a giant mirror, in which I could see the television, the back of my husband’s head, the children when they wandered into the room, and the dogs (Iggy and Fat Lola) sprawled on the bed. There are things I miss rather desperately about Capitola, but the condo is not one of them.

Mouse called from Capitola tonight. He’s visiting for the week, playing the piano in the coffee house late at night and dancing along the cement seawall on his way back to Mary Mary’s place. I look forward to him coming home on Friday. The house is too quiet when he is not here.

I finished The Letter this week. Finally. Its the one I have been mentally working on for more than a year, the one I wanted to send to the Board of Directors at The Pride Center downtown. Actually, it it a completely different letter than the one I first intended to write. But it is, I think, the right letter; the one I needed to send, anyway.Maybe that’s why it took me a year to write it, because I had to get enough distance to realize that what I needed to say and what was actually important for them to hear were not the same things.

I am sending three books for their library along with the letter. My sister made little stickers for me to put inside each one, which read: Donated to the Pride Center library in memory of Ashlie V.; beloved daughter and fierce friend. There is a part of me that wanted to keep the books as soon as they arrived. (I’ve read them all, but own none of them) but I also hope that some day, someone like me will wander through their door in search of information that they didn’t have when I wandered through their door, and someone will go to the shelf and pull down one of those books and give it to her. It is a small gesture and at this moment, even the small gestures feel like  milestones.

Nothing feels finished, except that I met an arbitrary goal. I am pleasantly surprised and proud of having done so and I have learned a variety of things along the way. The simplest to articulate are as follows:

I am more myself when I am writing.
I am more connected to myself when I am writing consistently.

The above are related but actually very different things. Having learned (or at least remembered) them, it seems obvious then that I should continue in some manner to do what I have been doing. Maybe not to such an extent that I fuck my wrists and arms and hands up, but doing at least a little of it every day. At the moment, this feels like a safe space in which to do some of that and as long as that continues to be true, I’ll try to do so.

what does one do when one’s word-processing program starts autocorrecting each instance of the word “mother” to “motherfucker”? should one fix the program first and then worry about the implications or wash ones mouth out (or is it fingertips in this instance?) with Lava soap, pop a Xanex and take a nice little nap?

For two days, I’ve written shit, in that I’ve barely written and most of what I wrote was shit, which is interesting only in that I have apparently begun to qualify the quality as well as measure the quantity of what I’m writing.

It is 1:23 a.m., the early morning of November 1^st 2009. At the long desk in the living room of our rented Central Valley California house, my husband sits beside me. There are three dogs asleep on the couch behind us. Down the hall, my eldest sister is typing quietly on her laptop while the cat sleeps on the bed behind her and her fish has hunkered down in his castle for the night.

I am writing this here and now because I committed, less than two hours ago, to writing 1,700 words a day for thirty days. To be fair, I did this while in the middle of a bout of bagel-making, which renders me susceptible to visions of superpowers.

My sister, the one down the hall, is writing a novel. Her third for NaNoWriMo. I have begun my share of novels, but never managed finished one and while various friends have slogged through their own National Novel Writing Novembers, I have never given myself over to the process, nor am I technically doing so now. Mostly, I want to prove to myself that I can still write and honestly, the first step in doing so is giving myself the right and a reason to write again. Both of those things are important and difficult.

Committing to support my sister’s intention to write a rough draft of her novel in the space of one month (at approximately 1,700 words a day) by committing to write the same amount every day feels like an enormous commitment, as these days,  I find it difficult to commit to anything at all.

317 words in, the time change comes and we take a break for bagels. In the middle of the night, in the middle of California, on the border between October and November in the worst year of my life, my sister and I slather cream cheese on still warm chunks of sun-dried tomatoes and discuss plot and characters and such things until it is time to get back to work.

In theory, at the end of this new month, we both have a stack of pages filled with rows of words; hers, a neatly ordered novel, with plot and character development and all these nice twists and turns. While mine, well I have no fucking idea what they will be. Hell, I only committed to this three hours ago under duress, and in the glow of bagel-making in the middle of the night.