Word After Word

Two sentences.  Took seven hours.

This really difficult family situation I’m having got astonishingly complex (there’s a dear dog involved now and it’s more than I can bear); I was distracted and dissolving and grief stricken and researching and calling; I’m fantastically proud I wrote two sentences. I can’t even tell you how hard.

They aren’t even new sentences. Today’s two sentences—they’re the same sentence. I’m repeating myself. I’m repeating myself: this exact same sentence appears in the Prologue of my book.

You could call what I wrote today a refrain. I refrained from not writing.

I recommend this tactic. Call it refraining. When I copied over the sentences (obviously it’s a sentence I like very much) and decided to use it as the opening for section two of the book, I felt like a writer.

Now, it’s 6:50 pm and that’s all I have written today (besides the laminating blog post) but I have those two sentences, like a thin string, keeping me tied to the book, the place of concentration and focus.

I love my sentences. So much so that after I wrote them I actually went downtown to the florists and bought an expensive (thirty seven dollars) bouquet of flowers. For myself. (Thirty seven dollars is more than I have ever spent on flowers for myself. Up until now I have been a Single Stem Purchaser.) The card for me says Congratulations! The bouquet is white roses and there’s pale yellow fallen leaves tucked in between them and veiny gold flowers that look like they will last a long, long, long time. It’s a bouquet of triumph over death. But acknowledging death.

As was this day.