The unfolding never ends
07 September 2011 06:54 AM Categories: Writing prompts | Insomnia
We were all up before five a.m., my mother and husband because he was taking her to the airport, me because, well, that’s just me, and the boy because he tends to wake up in the early morning hours unless there is someone sleeping beside him. I turned off the hall light and coaxed the boy back into bed. We lay next to each other and listened to cars starting up and trains mournfully announcing their presence. I coughed and he told me he was sorry that I was coughing and then he settled in and I resisted the bed’s seduction and pulled myself away. The boy is sleeping still, though that may not last much longer.
I’ve been using my inhaler more lately, with my weird bedtime coughs and little gasps. It waits for me on the bookshelf next to my bed, beside the tissue box and the flat stone that Kevin found years ago where I set my cups of hot water, my glasses of wine. The shelves underneath hold magazines (New York, the New Yorker) and books and journals in various states of legibility and angst. Any notebook you might find in this house, any notebook of mine, will have a journal entry in it somewhere, from a time when I just couldn’t help myself and had to write to get something out of my head, to figure out how I felt.
Journal writing hasn’t interested me lately. There’s too much that I am not yet ready to make real. I tire of speculating and predicting and sounding like I know what the future holds. While it may be comforting to believe that, it’s a lie, a form of control, one of the things I need to leave behind, this death grip on an idea of reality. I have to ride reality out in its solidity, let it reveal itself to me gradually, a toe here, an ankle there, the slow striptease, the show of flesh.
Ah, and here is where my mind gets caught on the feel of a hand on a knee. I distract myself with the vision where nothing exists but touch and desire and the unfolding, the never-ending unfolding, the story without end, the landscape rolling out in front of me.
From the prompt "Bedside table."
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. Unless I tell you otherwise, this is the original 12-minute prompt edited only for clarity and typos.
Image by ♥KatB Photography♥
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