What if I Gave Up Writing (a Lori Tale)

Or if writing gave up on me?

Lori is my child muse. When life is complicated, I bring Lori to me for her innocence and her simplistic views on the world and the creativity she brings to my work.

I could spend time looking at the clock, but for what reason? Hope does not appear on its face and stopping the clock’s hands won’t halt the march of life on its way passed the next sunrise, on its way to the last sunset.

Empty or not, I measure the days, wondering if tomorrow will become a victory simply because it is tomorrow. Hopes are heaped, one on top of the other, but expectations can be a lonely trap, so I keep a list of what life owes me.

Once in the outside air, the despairing times slacken to something akin to worry, a shade of hopelessness, something that refuses to back away entirely. I swallow ideas wondering whether I can regurgitate a story, a fiction, with enough interest to resuscitate and let it become a sentence, then another...

Mr. Harry, can you help me, please?

It’s different today, I’m expecting Lori. I need to apologize to her. For some years she has been an inspiration to me, a child, never growing a day older, often reviving me from that dark place. I told her my love was fiction.

Yes, Lori, I’ll be right there.

I built a gate into my backyard where once the yard was open to the trees. Lori and I, we’ve always had a gate. One she needs help with to open.

Hello, Lori.

You’ve put a gate into your garden, Mr. Harry. Why?

You, reader, must forgive me if my love of Lori seems unimportant or fictional. It is a love that exists in these sentences, yet Lori’s breath on my cheek is as real as the truth.

Helping you with the gate, Lori, that’s how we come together. There must be a gate to open.

But Mr. Harry, why must it be so heavy?

So that you’ll always need me, Lori.

Of course, I’ll always need you, Mr. Harry. That’s silly.

I’m reminded how a sentence or a thought arrives but stops short of how I thought it might inspire. Write the word Lori, and words are simply regurgitated onto the page, word-to-word resuscitation, reviving me from that dark place.

Lori is no more fictional to me than the words behind my tongue.

I should have been swallowing her into my life, not dictionaries, not ideas missed, words passing in a blur, never picked up, or said hastily, insincere, told in the way of the night passing. Goddamn the writer!

Mr. Harry, have you lost something? You look sad.

Come, take my hand child. Sometimes, Lori, the world of the writer is so much larger when moving through it not being.

Can we sit by the fishpond, Mr. Harry? It’s such a nice change to get a warm day in January.

I’d like that, Lori.

I don’t understand you, Mr. Harry. Can you say it again, this time for a child?

I look down at her and wonder what she sees in me. These creases etched into my face, made up over a lifetime, aging years of insincerity, deep inside the lines that time has carved.

Say it for a child, Lori. Well, it’s the loss of joy for the small things. I’ve been busy searching for that big idea. Lying in my bed, my head is more dangerous on a mattress than it would be in a fog.

That is not working for me, Mr. Harry. Ideas, mattress, fog, it’s too complicated.

Perhaps it’s not a child’s problem, Lori. As new days are born, so old decades will die, the joy of writing small things, living a life without reward or prize never seems good enough.

Oh, Mr. Harry, you’ve lost inspiration. Why didn’t you say that?

Loss is loss, and there’s no sugarcoating the losing, dear Lori.

Mr. Harry, all you did is drop it somewhere. The wind will gather it up. You’ll find it. Maybe it was blown into a railway station, a flower bed, or it’s caught in a treetop, Mr. Harry.

One cannot disappoint a child who loves you. There’s the world, the air, and life, as yet unlooked for, full of their wisdom.

You cannot sit and look inside yourself for inspiration, Mr. Harry. It’s all outside, under the trampling of leaves, and hearing twigs snap under the hooves of deer. You should begin immediately, Mr. Harry, people are waiting. Or maybe they are not here yet.

Passengers we are, carried by a universe too big to contemplate, without a destination except journey’s end.

Can you see it, Mr. Harry? Can you feel it? Look through my eyes, come stand behind me.

I see it, Lori. I see every second of every day and there are spaces I’ve yet to fill.

Do you dare, Mr. Harry? Do you dare to fill spaces with words? Do you dare to carry on, tie strings that need tying, claim back ideas you lost, and now flying on the wind, waiting for a hand to pull them down?

Yes, Lori. I understand.

Good, well I will need a hand with the gate, Mr. Harry.

We hauled open the gate, and it was as if a wind picked up a laughing child, carrying her aloft.

Inspiration.

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