The Post I Didn't Mean to Write

It started because I had nothing to say.

I opened a blank draft around ten o'clock, no plan, just that restless feeling you get when you don't want to watch TV but you also don't want to do anything useful. I typed a sentence. Then I deleted it. Typed another. Kept it. And then something happened that I can't fully explain, which is that I just kept going, and somewhere in the middle paragraph I stopped trying to be clever and started being honest, and by the time I got to the end I had written something I didn't recognize as mine until I read it back.

I published it. Then I sat very still.

processing what she just published

I've been running this blog since April, about five months now, and I don't think I understood until tonight what I was actually doing here. I thought it was a creative outlet. A thing to point to if someone asked what I was up to. Maybe a place to work out the gap-year question in public so I'd have to follow through. And it has been all of those things. But tonight it was the place where I figured something out that I didn't know needed figuring out, and I only know it now because I wrote it down. That's new. I've never had a journal that wrote back in the form of clarity before.

The lopsided pottery bowl is still on my dresser.

the bowl stays. that's the whole thing.

I made it in a one-time class last winter because a friend dared me to try something I'd be bad at, and I kept it because it was the most uncomfortable hour I'd had in months and I came out of it with something. I think tonight was like that. I didn't plan it. It came out crooked and a little surprising and I'm keeping it. That's how I know it was real.