I left a trail of crumbs so I could find my way back to the work. (Each day of missed work seems to require two days of struggling-to-work and they accrue, some kind of terrifying exponential calculus). I knew I’d be away for five days.  So, to ease the struggle, before I left town I placed my favorite memoirs on the chair. A little monument of inspiration. I plunked folders holding my drafted chapters across the floor of the studio, like bright stepping stones. My helpful notes for revision and little post-its (it’s a slippery slope to lamination) sparkled on the desk and the walls. I left the manuscript open to page 104, the copy Jackie’s read using her incredibly useful Track Changes Mode. All the neat grey bubbles, lined up like orderly clouds in the right margin, containing as silver lining her comments: “We’ve gleaned this.” And “Accurate? More like ‘was related to’?” Stopping in the middle of editing a page, Jackie’s comments—wise, friendly—calling out like conversation—I thought I was golden. I thought I’d come back from my trip, five days away from the book, (I took a chapter with me, but I didn’t look at it—still, I thought I’d be okay) and wake up, walk into the studio, and work. Easily.

 

Two weeks later. 

I’m working again. As of yesterday. It took thirteen days to break the book back open and worm my way in!

 

Horrible.

 

It’s like when we leave town, a terrible mighty force swoops into the writing room and snaps the whole project into a 90mm plastic bag and runs it through the Seal-A-Tor machine so its vacuum packed, preserved, impermeable, frozen, unknowable.

 

I know I could have worked three minutes a day (I have written about this very practice in many different ways) on the book on my trip and thereby created holes in the plastic so it could at least breathe. Little punctures. Like breath. I did not do this.

 

I came back and I couldn’t feel the book. I saw the crumbs. I knew the route. I saw Jackie’s comments through the plastic. But some force made the gap between me and the book so vast, all I could day after day was stare at the project and think how bad it was. I couldn’t see how to get back into the thing. It was like the book was dead. Each morning, I ran from the room. I closed my eyes and ran.

 

On the plane on the way back from my trip, the woman in front of me had a little dog in a carrier, that fit under the seat in front of her. When the flight attendant came by, she said, “He has to be in the carrier at all times,” the woman leaned over and put the dog back in and zipped him up—I guess she’d wanted to hold him for take off. We were in the sky nd the attendant came by, checking what he checks and he stood by the woman, looming over our area, and he shook his head. And made a terrible face. “We will land this plane,” he said loudly, so as to activate passenger alarm and mass disapproval, “If the dog is out one more time.”

 

“He leaped! He popped out! I’m lucky I caught him when I did, this just this minute happened!” She craned around to activate passenger sympathy. “He just leaped up I swear to god.”

 

The puppy that “jumped” out: I wish the book did that. I wish it sprang out of its little traveling case into my lap there was nothing I could do but start working! It just happened so fast! 

It’s really unearthly hard to build an entire new puppy from scratch. It can’t be done. And that’s what it feels like I’m going to have to do, after I’ve been away and I come back, and the book seems dead, so gone.   

 I know what to do. WORK ANYWAY. I woke up each morning, knowing. It was like the dead thing in the sealed plastic emitted a force field that repelled me into the beyond. Instead of working I have been doing the following. This is the topography of the back of the beyond

 

–folded contour sheets, art not yet mastered; called R. for training session

–put all my bed linen into tubs, crunching and stuffing contour sheets until training session, created labels for the tubs with my Brother 2000, my real brother, and alphabetized the tubs in the newly developed Linen Land, which has street lighting.

–made chicken coq-au-vin

–researched and purchased hing, osha root, and Bragg’s amino acids

–sorted all winter socks from fall and summer socks (there are no spring socks—spring is for bare legs and frigidosis), balled and alphabetized the socks by heft, color, and blatant favoritism

–researched a trip to Atlantic City, possibly leaving on Sunday, in order to not work on the book in New Jersey, a place I have not yet not worked

–viewed hundreds of Popeye cartoons

–bathed nineteen baths

–wrote my father three letters

–purchased four pair of shoes and returned three

–completed with a high level of detail three customer comment cards at three restaurants

–engaged many, many, many shopkeepers and citizens in extensive conversation about dry cleaning processes, (some) dogs’ craving for munching on an unmentionable substance during winter (no names!) augmented by sturdy lengthy analysis of why the product named “For-Bid” would brag on its packaging Makes Feces Unpalatable!; ubiquitous wheat discussions, discount card expiration complaining, why hidden and strange fees everywhere?, ice scraper locations, the Tuesday night ride—what are they doing?, skin, what’s new in plagiarism, bag rack placement, layoffs of writers in the large office furniture manufacturing businesses, Air Force training in general and what in particular provokes sobbing at basic training graduation (the sound of so many boots), The Michigan Guide to Divorce, how it’s hard to wink at a man if you have to wear a hair net (you both coat), rebounders, the blog, and the vagaries of city tulip planting coverage—was our street fully planted, or not? Were several stretches overlooked completely and if so why? 

These are the topics of avoidance. This is the shape of not writing. This is the dialogue of a terrified avoidant puppy-runner-away-from-er, a sensitive, happy, well-adjusted girl not making art. 

This last trip was so eye-opening and eye-closing—aka I slept and I never sleep, it was, I think, absolutely worth it, this two week wrestling to get my project out of suspended animation, thawed, sprung loose.

 

I’m going to have devise some kind of new ways to slide back in to the work. I’m not sure how to do it. Those folders and books I laid out—they  made the place look like a mausoleum. I wonder what needs to shift.

 

Or if there are seasons to writing, making art.

 

Athletes get injuries. Dancers get strains and sprains. Is this our injury? I’m not convinced. I’m thinking about Mark Morris and “extra sensitive.” I need to think about this more.