The Thing I Keep Not Writing Down

November second. There is a sentence in my notebook that I have written and crossed out three times tonight, and I am starting to think the crossing-out is the actual subject.

I am not going to explain what the sentence is. That is the whole problem with it. It is one of those things that feels completely manageable as a thought and turns slightly embarrassing the moment it becomes words, not because the thing itself is embarrassing, but because writing it down makes it real in the specific way that means I would have to decide something about it. And I am not ready to decide something about it. I am, apparently, ready to sit at this kitchen table for two hours and drink cold coffee and cross out the same sentence repeatedly, but I am not ready to decide. I think that is called being twenty-eight.

Mid-sentence, mid-feeling, about the same thing, obviously

The weird thing is I noticed the feeling before I had a name for it. That's the order it came in. First the noticing, just a general heightened-attention quality to certain moments, the kind where you replay a small exchange afterward not because anything happened but because something was different about how you were paying attention. Then, several days later, the slow realization that the noticing is pointed. That it is not general. That it has a direction. This is apparently how it works for me. Very slow. Very interior. Involving a spiral notebook and several cold coffees and eventually a blog post in which I tell you nothing concrete.

Five objects on a windowsill and an unsent sentence in a notebook

The windowsill looks the same tonight as it always does. Five objects, same order, the slightly cool light from outside and the warm overhead light from the kitchen landing on them the way they always do in November. I don't know why I keep looking at it when I'm stuck. I think it's because everything on it was once an open question that eventually just became furniture, and I find that reassuring. The notebook is still open. The sentence is still crossed out. That's fine for now.