a hiccup

I've found the last few times I've written that the empty page absorbs a sentence or two and then something occurs that makes me have to reload and those sentences are gone.

I had been thinking about the emptiness of the page vs the emptiness of the canvas. How I find it so much simpler to see invitation to paint and prohibition against writing.

I've always written though. Always meaning up until just gone fourteen years ago. The fourteen years ago time when I crashed my entire life and went in short order from an assistant professor (temporary parttime not tenure track but nonetheless a decent gig with health insurance and a reasonable salary) at the local college on the hill, with a house and two children and a husband and a flower garden and a respectably large if not completely respectable gaggle of friends. In those days I was writing a book at night, and ghostwriting other books in day and teaching and taking yoga classes and generally seeming pretty securely tethered to the middle class.

We didn't ever have much money though. Certainly half the people in the suburbs don't have much money but the ones with better credit could fake it. I was worried about money. I'd been constantly worried about money for my entire marriage and before that there was year or so when the worry abated slightly because I was working in advertising and doing well. The benefits were coming and it was clear to me that one day I could be like the old guys spending their days thinking about their weekends. I'd been in the cubicles for years by then. At the current age that I am years isn't much. I've done everything now for years. If you totted up my time on the toilet or dragging on cigarettes or waiting in lines, it'd be years. But then at twenty-five, years had hardly even started to happen to me. Way back then and it feels almost like looking backwards through a telescope to think of the girl I was way back then. But I was a writing girl. I always had notebooks and I always wrote in them.