As soon as I enter the a music, all the CDs, titles, artists I had stored in my mind for just this moment melt away. Gone.
Like writing. Through the day, ideas, sentences, scenes and character traits flood my mind. I have an urgent need to remember them for later or scribble them onto any convenient piece of paper -- the blank margin of a train schedule, the back side of a cable bill. I will store these ideas for later, when I can spend time with them, craft them into something brilliant, or at least worthwhile. When I have time later, they will come together to form a story, powerful images packed with meaning.
Later comes. It is late at night and my mind feels worn from the phonecalls, conversations of the day. I settle down to filter out all the ideas swimming around in my mind and lay them down into real words typed into a document. But when I try to skim them out of the water, they evaporate in the process or become discolored and distasteful when exposed to air. Throw them away and nevermind.
In Barbados one year, my father chartered a fishing boat. We were on vacation with his girlfriend and his girlfriend's daughter. The boat was small and had two fighting chairs nailed into the deck beneath plywood boards. We left early in the morning when everything was crisp, the sprinkles of water that lapped up the side of the boat, the salt residue on my skin, the sun's heat, and the flat blue horizon line at the edge of the sea. We reeled in dolphin fish, one after the other. When you hook one, the fish leaps straight out of the water, hangs and flutters in mid-air to show it's rainbow skin, a prism for a coat. It does this all the way to the boat, pulling and fighting, leaping and dazzling. But you persist and win. Its gaffed and slapped onto the deck of the boat, sea water leaking from its gills, panting. You flip it over, but the rainbow skin is gone. Its only a gray and dark gray fish. It could be a trout from New Jersey.
What was I thinking about earlier today that seemed worthwhile.
It was a theory about something. Relationships? Always relationships. Turning 30? What is it like to turn 30? You hit your stride and find that it is lonelier than you imagined. You look around and notice all of the things that you could have made your life to be, but you have not. You are down a path that has taken you somewhere and you don’t remember choosing it. The choices are far less. You struggle not to be fatalistic and have to remind yourself that you are only 30, even though you feel much older and more constrained than ever.You are not able to use exact imagery to convey this feeling. It is only important to you. Move on.
There were things I wanted to write down after the movie. Things that I observed. The weekend. The glitz of the boardwalk and its cast of characters. Feeling apart from it all. Always feeling apart from it all? The prominence of memories. Sensory memories. No, something entirely different. The confidence it takes to be a writer. The self-absorption it takes to be a writer. Or is it the opposite. The need to be sensory at all times, sensitive to everyone’s feelings.
That wasn’t it. None of this was it. It was a character. And what was the character thinking when all of this was going on? Something important, not fleeting.
Another idea that sounds brilliant in the mind, but deteriorates to sloppy and silly on the page. Another nevermind.
