I have no idea what to write

So I guess I'll write nothing...

Dear Writer,

There was a big storm out here this week. A foot and a half of snow in the last 24 hours, which is not unusual for this area. I haven’t left the house, unless you count poking my head out of the front door to get the mail and seeing footprints in the snow I didn’t shovel and sending a fervent apology out into the universe begging to all mailpersons to please, please forgive me.

This is why I’m moving to an apartment. I am a dreadful homeowner.

Anyway, I’m sitting here, wondering what to write and all I can hear is the drip, drip, drip of the melt coming off my roof, mocking the fact that I don’t know what I’m going to write about this week.

Usually, I can come up with something to write about. Some weeks are, I’m sure you’ve noticed, better than others. Some weeks, I’m still thinking about what I wrote last week and I can’t write that again. So what am I going to talk about? What could possibly be even interesting about my life? I’m about to move. Selling some things. Giving other things away. Setting the rest aside to take with us.

Drip. Drip. Drip.

You know how everyone is talking about mindfulness? Be in the moment? Just breathe?

Yeah. I’ve never felt a concept to be more, at its core, contradictory to my essence as a human. What, I should just sit? And, what? Be here? I’m here. Where the fuck else would I be? But while I’m here, I also have shit to do.

The irony is that, right now, when I have this to do, when I need to write a letter to you because it’s 3:29 on a Friday afternoon and I also have to record it for a podcast and I don’t know what I’m going to write about or how I’m going to get it all done in time… this is when the now sits with me. I am absolutely anchored in the now; the warmish glow off my computer screen, the fact that my desk is 10% desk and 90% clutter, the smell of the Woodwicks Woodsmoke scented wax melting slowly in the warmer, making it smell almost like woodsmoke in here.

And, of course….

Drip. Drip. Drip.

I am listening to the dull clacking of the keys, feeling my silver rings sliding a bit around my fingers as they type. My mousepad is not a mousepad; it’s an orange Moleskin-style notebook that I haven’t used to take notes in since I got my iPad with the Apple Pencil. It was a good notebook; now, it’s basically just a mousepad.

I wonder if it has a pervading sense of frustrated purpose? Does it wish for me to crack it open and write something on its pages? Or is it grateful that, unlike its filled-up predecessors, it’s not stuffed in a dark drawer only to see light when I need a pen or a lightning cable?

I am never in my life as present to the moment, to my surroundings, to my existence as when I don’t know what the hell to write. There is something about that experience of being in search of an unknown thing, rather than in active pursuit of a known thing, that brings me rushing back into this moment… this torturous, slow, purposeless moment when I really don’t have time to not have an idea, because it’s less than 24 hours before this essay, and the podcast of this essay that I must record, needs to be ready to land in your inbox. Not because you wouldn’t understand if it wasn’t there, but because I said it would be and I try to be a woman of my word like 90% of the time.

Drip. Drip. Drip.

The sound outside is muted from the snow. The traffic sounds that y’all hear in my podcast are quieter, because everyone has been told to stay the hell at home but some people either don’t have a choice or don’t think the advice applies to them. They have things to do. They know where they are going.

I, however, do not.

All I know is that I am going to sit here, in the now of this moment, listening to the goddamn melt drip, until I come up with an idea for this letter.

Everything,

L