My mind drifts. I think about last night. I think about what the words did to me, spilling out all open and raw on the page. I think about what I’m going to do to them, later.
By day I do my duty, the diligent wife, wedded from 8 to 5 to conversion numbers, to the dry cleaning, to the responsibilities. I am a picture perfect grown up on paper. But my deep red heart is somewhere else. It waits to slip away unnoticed in the evening, for the weighted August air, for the endless blank pages that are waiting. I have so much to fill them with.
Outside my window, a tiny leaf shakes and turns yellow. Fall is whispering in the background. The perfect time to have a little affair.
Photo via Christine Mandich.
I think about what I’m going to do to them, later.
You forget so much from college, you know? But one of the things that stuck with me was from the professor who taught me The Romantics, about Wordsworth. WW would go out into the world and just soak everything up, but he didn't try to write right away. He basically planned ahead to write about things after he'd cooled off, and he called it "emotion recollected in tranquillity"--he knew that things would take a different shape later on, when he put them in a different order than the one that was going to spill out when he was feeling the emotion in the first place.
He would have loved the idea of this infidelity. He would have offered you the key to a cabin to carry on your affair in secret.
Posted by: Kim | August 16, 2012 at 09:23 PM
It's true - what Kim said. There's something about letting thoughts, ideas steep in the brain. I love the rawness that pours out. I love how you capture this.
Posted by: tracy mangold | August 17, 2012 at 05:46 AM
The writing will come when the writer is ready!
Posted by: Dragonfly | August 19, 2012 at 04:53 PM
Affairs with fall... the most beautiful kind. That's what I'm drawing hope from today.
Posted by: Roxanne | August 23, 2012 at 11:33 AM