Writers always give the same advice when I ask about overcoming writer’s block: Write what you know. That’s the standard answer. Write what’s been going on in your life, what you know about, or what you’ve read until something breaks the blockade and you feel your prolific self again. All I know is, lately I’ve been having apocalyptic dreams, my house is still decorated with pumpkins and my weird cat towels, and Christmas is nearly a foreign concept.
I’ve whittled the causes of writer’s block down to two: apathy, or a hangup. I freely admit to being a master procrastinator, except I don’t usually procrastinate about my state of mind. Being stuck on anything, especially what I’m stuck on, is foreign to me. And maybe it is affecting my ability to write, or my drive to write, or just my writing anything I don’t crumple afterwards and discard. So here I am, drinking milk and eating mac-n-cheese out of a glass mixing bowl at 3:10 a.m., listening to Wilco… and, I suppose, wallowing.
The fall feels both endless and an eternity ago. This was, without exception, the longest fall I remember. I feel like a completely different person than I was at the end of August, sweating out my beloved Indian summer and trying to squeeze a final vacation into my September calendar. I felt life was on an upswing. Summer was like a reprieve of college, glamorized. More money, more fun, travel, freedom, and time with dear friends than I remember before graduation or, for that matter, since.
After an unexpected summer of waitressing in Annapolis, I came up to work in Baltimore. Money was better, working close to home meant free time was more plentiful, and bartending was infinitely preferable to the private hell that I find while waiting tables. And all of a sudden this bomb goes off.
Now I know I continue to be a worse judge of character than I think I am. I try and listen to the science of Blink. To re-evaluate past interactions, looking for the signals that will alert me the next time someone close to me shouldn’t be. I failed. I’m just going to write about it, because isn’t that the name of the writer’s block game?
Let’s call him Jerry, because that was his name. I met this guy, this handsome, funny, sweet guy, while slinging liquor during an Eagles tribute concert. The bombs I mistook for fireworks. Within 24 hours, we’d spent two on the phone and he came to the next night’s concert just to see me afterwards. Everything was, instantaneously, perfect. Not even suspiciously so. I always believed I would feel a certain epiphany when I fell in love, and it plowed me into this man.
So everything is ideal. Capsule version of Mr. Perfect: Sang to me and played the guitar when I volunteered to wash dishes from the dinner he’d cooked me. Standing weekly date for Pushing Daisies. Birthday date turned around from disaster of my car being towed. Introductions to various lauding friends on both sides. Steely Dan at the 13th floor. Weekend beach getaway. Sweet gift of book with letter in front. The let’s-date-exclusively talk. Hearing the word “love,” while not used as the L-bomb, fifteen times a day, used to describe his sentiments toward various minutiae of my being. Et cetera.
It’s tough to put into words now, but after a short time of dating what I had on my hands was the promise of a long time of being together, and when Mr. Not-So-Perfect up and disappeared after a suspicious weekend “business trip,” I was just plain crushed. Bridget Jones crushed. I’d sworn not to use my blog for personal blather, specifically for heartbreak, yet it seems to be all I can think about. I have no justification for how in the world I let myself get so involved with Jerry in just nine weeks.
Another thing I know is that not speaking to someone, not even giving them the satisfaction of closure, is maybe the cruelest thing you can do. Being told to drop dead would be infinitely preferable to the open-endedness of being blatantly ignored by someone I thought I was falling in love with. And now I am behind the eight-ball, because it took me probably two weeks to realize in the first place that he hadn’t been swept up by a hurricane, kidnapped, or come down with a tragic disease and didn’t want to expose me to it– he had simply decided, in the middle of a conversation, that he was done talking to me. Poof! Never heard from him again.
Well, it’s clear now that’s not going to work out. That’s fine. I’ve come to terms with that. What’s still on my mind, and still holding me up, is the thought of him. I shared so much with him, from simple things like music and cuisine to more personal intimacies, that I feel like I’m spinning my wheels. What do you do with your mind when you let someone share it with you, and then they disappear with it? That’s my dilemma now. It would be hysterical but not off-point to say I feel I am missing something, and it has something to do with Jerry. Now, if I could just figure out what that is…
So I find myself still wrapped up in an autumn that, even as I am mentally engaged in it, seems to have been ages ago. Having the person I was focusing on in those months disappear is making me feel like I’m missing time. For some reason my mind keeps thinking in terms of this month being October. It isn’t. December starts this weekend!
Wow, there’s that writer’s block breakthrough. I’m missing two months. Those two months I spent wrapped up in Jerry were two months I wasn’t focusing on myself. Lesson learned? What the hell do I know?
I know I need to write about No Country for Old Men and Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart, I need to stop obsessively comparing every date to the magnetism I felt towards Mr. So-not-Perfect, and I need to write down my apocalyptic dreams right here on this blog.
