There are owls outside in the woods, hooting and echoing to each other. The cat ignores them, languorous on the cat tree, awaiting royal attention.
She doesn’t feel the stress of my days except when it is all too much. Then she reaches a paw out and taps my hand, reminding me that the center of the world does indeed exist and needs to be petted. We all must pay the pet tax.
It has been a long, strange spring: as if the pandemic-induced hibernation is cautiously thawing into summer, with the hopes that heat will drive back the plague.
My days have drifted by: work, barn, play with cats, sleep. Eating somewhere in there.
Last weekend, two writer friends and I went for a socially distanced walk around town and caught up on many topics, but the biggest thing was how current events had impacted our writing. It was the first time any of us had done something close to normal in months.
It was enlightening-invigorating to spend time face-to-face instead of video-to-video.
After we were done with our walk but still talking by our cars, I realized that my fiction writing had stopped because there had been too much to process. I had carefully sequestered the intense grief around Kasane’s passing in a corner so I could deal with the pandemic which then got blocked up so I could deal with financial implications at my job (and everyone else’s).
This year has been piled higher and deeper for everyone. Some cope more graciously then others. For me, it’s about managing and maintaining stability for my job and my horses. That doesn’t require being emotionally connected internally. It just requires control and being in the moment for the horses, but that is a different mental shift and oddly remains clear.
The internal emotional connection lets me write evocative fiction (instead of fiction sounding like it was written by a technical writer). But still, I can’t just stop and reconnect and write.
It’s a process of first recognizing where the missing pieces are behind blocked up walls, tearing down those walls, dealing with the emotions, and then letting everything reintegrate so I can, finally, write.
And I really want to. I want to write something gory, something deliciously dark that can express this anger and desperation. I want to process these emotions through writing so they can surface and be let free instead of ticking like a tell-tale heart under the floorboards.
I want to let the emotions out so my monsters can scream upon the page and torment a character arc instead of my dreams.
