Puzzle

I haven't written in quite some time.  I'm not sure if it’s just life distracting me, or whether I'm distracting myself.  I talk to customers at work that inquire about my quill tattoo and I blather on about how I'm a writer.  Inevitably, they ask what I write.   In the past, the answers came quicker.  School newspaper.  Website/Blog.  Short stories.  Shitty front of book copy for various magazines here in Chicago.  Now?  I say fiction.  And just saying that is almost fiction too.

Sure I've got the one-act play, a piece that I wrote as an experiment.  It was meant to be light and funny.  And of course I got the usual nod of approval from friends and family.  But what else would they say?  But as I read it now, it just seems empty.  And subtanceless. 

Ah, yes.  The book projects.  Well of course I have those too.  But really, every time I sit down to work on those I get so caught up in the small errors and editing that I lose focus completely and surf the internet instead. 

Alas, I am in a creative desert.  This is actually the first real thing that I have written in quite some time.  But at least it feels good.  Like it should.

I used to say that the written word was my refuge.  Ha.  Now I feel as though I've been hiding from words.  Sneaking down into the bushes as the grammar police walk by on their nightly patrol.  When I'm at school tutoring, I work with my students on creating thesis statements and plot lines.   Right now the thesis statement of my life would sound something like this:

A bit dramatic yes, but truly real.  Or really true. 

See, there I go again, fighting with those words.  And life.  My life has been a bit of an emotional rollercoaster lately.  Sometimes I'm ecstatic, optimistic and hopeful for all of life’s possibilities.  I try to stay positive.  Obnoxiously upbeat even.    But then there's the other times, when I'm lost, lonely even.  Lost in a maze of my own making.  It’s like I got amnesia and forgot the way out.  Everything’s familiar, but totally confusing.

I feel like a solitary puzzle piece trying to find a place on a puzzle so large and endless that sometimes it seems impossible.  And sometimes I find a fit.  Then the shapes around me change, or I do.  Either way, I'm up again looking for another spot to nestle in and make my own.  

And the thing is, I really like puzzles.  I guess they just wear me down sometimes.