Writing

For the moment can write again

When I first came here there were no blinds in the office windows. In the days before the movers came it wasn’t our home yet, just a house we’d bought.

Now the blinds are almost completely closed

Except for a few gaps, and the skylights, my office is closed off. Sun filters through the oaks and then the paper blinds: the interior world has taken over so I can barely see anything outside… I used to write, and then started writing things I didn’t want to share, and stopped sharing, and stopped writing. As though to write is to share, to keep it for myself is to not write at all.

Then something changed…

At Peets on this sunny November day, I am writing as well as making myself known to those around me. I look at them and they look back. My heart flutters in a way it hasn’t for a while.

I feel their eyes

A woman compliments a man’s pitbull mix as she passes. He fails to respond and I see her raise her jacket and hitch up her yoga pants, showing off her butt as she crosses the street to the kitchen store. I divide my attention between the overweight but curly-haired guy with his little dress-shirted friend of apparent Asian ancestry, and the woman in her puffy green jacket and mask trying the locked door to a kitchen store.

She gives up at the kitchen store and turns around. The man of apparent Asian ancestry looks at me. I look down but wonder if he and the curly haired guy are sitting there with their pitbull trying to pick up other guys. Is that a thing? She walks along the sidewalk, crossing back this way. I stare at her until she comes towards me and says “hi,” in a similar cheerful (overly cheerful?) way as she complemented the man’s pitbull. I say “hi” cheerfully also and she passes by.

What was that?

I start writing, again, and soon it’s time to go.