I have all these words and no place to put them. The serenity I had before has been washed away by a torrent of angular, black and white words that won't come out properly.
It's six thirty in the morning, black, and I can hear fat, slow raindrops landing on some metal plate inside the fireplace, and dropping onto the flower beds outside the window where I sit.
Outside, it looks as though no one but me is awake, but I know that can't be true. People must be awake by now, blow drying their hair to the sound of the morning news program in the next room, coffee percolating in the kitchen.
Because of the rain, maybe they will sit in their SUVs and sedans by the bus stop, the exhaust rising up in coils, the children, coats and book bags all squashed together in the back, still half asleep while their mother puts on mascara using the visor mirror.
In one of the blogs I read today, she said that we write because we are convinced that the story must be told. That is true, in my experience, but I no longer have any clear conviction.
I want to write grandiose things like, I've always been able to write..., but that simply wouldn't be true. There have been other times in my life when I couldn't, when other things were pressing in so deep and quick that I couldn't keep up with myself.
Now is definitely one of those times. My creativity and imagination have not been able to keep up with myself. They are lagging far behind, like toys that I forgot at the park, when I got into the car to go home. They are lying beside the sandbox, forlorn, clearly well-loved, while I am looking out the window at the landscape rising and falling as it speeds past me.
I want to go back and get them; I want to insist that this metaphor doesn't work, because they must still be in my possession.
They must be, but I've no idea what I want to do with them. I don't know what I want to imaginatively create with words anymore, or why.
I know the time tested advice: write, write, write and write some more regardless.
I hate that advice. And anyway, that's not what I'm saying. I know how to write. If I wanted to just write I could do so until the bloody cows came home.
And I think, well then, write about God. You like writing about God. But that's not the thing, either. God is not an imaginative vision that I create. He's His own person that I experience on a personal level. Writing about God is the same as writing about my marriage; it's a personal record, not a creative expression.
I've lost my internal creative compass; I've lost my sense of direction. That shimmering mirage, far out in the distance, beguiling, that world that isn't, but I want it to be, so I draw it out in long lines of words. It isn't there anymore.
I feel like I lost a part of myself. I feel so purposeless now. What use is a writer without her mirage?
I keep telling myself to be patient, that it will come back, or reform, somewhere over the horizon. It will be in a new place, taking a different shape, and then I pour out all this uncomfortable burden of words into its pursuit.
That's what I tell myself. After an adoption is final, and you have settled into motherhood- you'll write then. After this excruciating anxiety has passed away, has stopped crushing the life out of you, the little flame will spring up, like an internal swamp light, beckoning.
I hope so.
