My Word Count Journal Project started January 1, 2009.
Object: Write 1 word the first day, 2 words the second day and so on for 365 days having then written 66,795 words at the end of one calendar year - more than the average novel!
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I caught hold of a marvelous moon in my entry level lasso. I wasn’t wearing boots or a hat and hadn’t had much handling. All through April, I dreamed of the creeks rising, birds laying stone eggs, my teeth chattering to the tune of old hymns. By the time May came around, I was a nervous wreck and didn’t dare think of sleep for the trinkets it told me to hold inside my head. But this was a night much later on, in a field far from my home. These were gloves I’d been wearing for years to pack snowballs or dig rows to plant sweet potatoes. Or paint walls or catch foul balls. And they had holes large enough to see patches of skin I’d been saving for an occasion like this. Inviting and amorous hands I had crafted myself out of paper and porcelain some boring June afternoon. Before I wrote the stories or wondered what giraffes ate. Before I knew phone numbers I wanted to memorize or had listened to someone’s heartbeat through their bare chest. So there it was, that mystic moon, glinting like every eye i’d ever seen just before closing. My breath caught on my teeth and the night air whispered demon quick and sweet like jasmine. “Grab it, now!” and my wrists flicked knowingly, uncoiling soft loops of rope in swift lilting lines through ink…
Stunning meadows steal our shadows. Bird beaks break like old bread. Like old words barely said. What greener grass we needed…what empty weather reports we heard and unheeded. I’m remembering a dream of a hawk and some quivering mouse. My scream filled the house. Singing jungles feed our families in old coins buried. Like the time we ate piranha and chuckled alone. Waiting for dawn to break this spell. Thirsty for underhanded devils, some sort of adventure. Hummingbirds, we hovered at a sweet opening and offered our own ruby-throated kiss. It went on like this all summer. Kite strings around our wrists and candy stuck to our bare feet. You played music for me late into the night and I rocked back and forth in sand that was slipping underneath me. Searching for beach glass and doctors’ notes. Running vandals steal our grandmas’ saddest nights alone. Spray paint their laments on new cement. Circling around like a broken dream of a hurricane. The weather came back to haunt us. My green kept tight in a fist, your pain ready to read me a story. Building bird houses kept hands busy. Old nails, stained wood. Burying the evidence taught me how to be quieter. Your mother won’t come down from the roof tonight. It’s a full moon she calls to us. Ambling shadows steal our windows, shower stones against the glass. Reminders.
Stealing cannonballs. hungry like cats with dead eyes. hard as tacks, steel, harder, maybe. Stealing spectrums of sound with cupped hands. Pictures taken of bridges breaking, not burning, never burning. Stealing avalanche dreams from my own small self, prairie rain extinguishing the sinister sparks I learned to look for out my own back door. Packing lunches for trips I imagined but never took. Books I still can’t read. Stealing sentences from songs and stories and psalms and suicide notes. Learning to like the way my own mouth mimics your panting breaths. Your miracle muffled mania. Stealing clocks so no one knows when it’s time to go. Jealous of the iodine sting my mother used to bring. Fast moving ships on the skyline. Old signs on old beaches where we still swim in new skin. Stealing headaches and clever slogans to sell a new way out of here. Every buck a new battle with bereaving scenes I’m leaving. Artificial art and artifice, avarice, blue bomb shells on black sand ampersands. Stealing early afternoons, grass stains, cherry tree bark, torn gloves. Watching for rain drops, signs of spring. All the weapons we need buried in our sleeves. hungry like hearts that pump too hard. drastic plastic people furrowing their faces as they hurry off to important places. Stealing bridges, matches, diaries. Exploding the fireworks of discovering the uncovering. Left with petty theft.
All the shrapnel of a Thursday night echo embedded in a eulogy whispered. I came apart like carpet, unraveled myself right in front of everyone. Fell away like old stars imploding into dark. Remembered for a moment the dancing in mud, the finger in the vortex, the lightning storms, the old guitar songs on the beach. All the anger that slammed like fists into a steering wheel, breaking the horn that blared through that small town from end to end. It wasn’t the first time I fixed something for you. Sent you gifts, letters, dust, ash, a lock of my hair. Heart-shaped jealousy packed between the mattress and box spring. Picked up like an old wire antenna. This was how we snaked our ways through each other’s innocence. Now when your mouth moves, I don’t hear anything. I ache inside my ribs, choking on cold air, dreaming of backyard picnics. What would it take to pave over these old crash sites? Tear down the memorials for all we’ve lost and resurrect new losses loose like change. All the destruction of a kicked in door. Wailing violins, jerky rhythms, dirty dishes, green eyes speckled with doubt. Symbols spray painted on broken mirrors to mock my superstitions still scare me. My unencumbered fantasy sewn with invisible thread, stitches sparse like static. Through the floorboards, these habits are heard all night long.
All we need is rest. These jumping days, screaming moments have run the ragged flags of our hearts into the ground. These cattle-prod calendars shoving us forward, through to the next named thirtysomething days collected in squares to cross off. All we need is perspective, a trip to the outer atmosphere so we can look down in timeless wonder and regret nothing but our lack of gravity. Sighing heavy, holding hands, all we need is a new plan, to plant a garden, eat some pie, fall asleep in the afternoon. All we need is a vacation, maybe. A dream journal so we remember the times we knew before we knew what would happen next. The haphazard weeks collected like old newspapers tied and bundled in a basement. No more wristwatch warnings, no more errant alarms. All we need is the smell of smoke, the feel of soft cloth dried outside on mothers’ clotheslines, cold lemonade, loud music. Or to change the channel, to ignore daylight savings time and sleep straight through the mayhem we’re causing by not showing up. Maybe we’ll get fired and then watch out! We’ll be spinning this globe for a new place to land, packing our bags, saying our goodbyes, locking the doors when we leave. All we need is courage, open hearts, lust for new adventures. Picture frames stand empty waiting for us.
All night alabaster dreams, less than authentic. More than fever-fed, a new illness written in fine lines, palms of open hands. As if we made this a ritual, the murmurs and underhanded throws, the music boxes we traded for money. So now I imagine splinters from my childhood, picnic tables, wild white horses. It came upon the forested caving, a new soundtrack full of broken branches and bitter berries. I thought I was a doctor, listened for your pulse, shone a light in your eyes and ears. Were we friends then? It’s hard to keep track of the moments, the important ones sorted from the rest. We sat on pillows chanting like half moon sisters. Waiting for someone to invite us in. To mail our letters for us because we never had stamps. I forgot what it felt like when you brushed my hair. You stopped asking. The quiet crept in to taunt us, outside girls jumping rope, shrieking and laughing. Memory snapping to the past and present, maybe the future…a deja vu of things to come. These nights are more for yelling, peeling off price tags, eating leftovers, sewing up holes. The dream book lies empty next to the bed. The guitar unplayed, missing strings, dusty in the corner. The books are good company, the teacups, the sounds of an old heater, unlit candles, your scent.
Maybe I needed your sail, your compass. Beacon leaking my own small speaking. Small and weak and windbroke breathing. All the clocks reset, worn in loud rooms, strapped to stomachs like unplugged bombs. Maybe I needed your floating dreams, arms like snakes to lick my face. Arbitrary angles we drew like flight paths on maps of stamps and hard holes in empty Alps. Justifying the dying light, a new rage-fed phase to steam our envelopes open. Maybe your song still plays, your music stays in the air. Yelled like lists of last words, old regrets, tired flags stained with surrender. Maybe your laugh still stabs sidewalks, the worms learning how light burns. So much afterglow, my own light flickers, stunted, then billows into banished blazes. I stood for photos afraid to smile, smirk, scream. I went missing and waited for the right time to return. I hid in tires taller than me. Vented to old overalls, skimped on situating my sins into empty film reel tins. Garbled, a bird plucking pieces of string, wood, glass to build a new nest. The kind of whistle that could kick a hole in your heart. Maybe I need a new chamber, a maid, a disastrous sense of a game well-played. Maybe I am coming unglued, bright as a holly berry, graduating into first thirst. Maybe cactus cuts can’t heal.
And so this silence makes its own sound, feathery and wild. It has been too long, we think to ourselves. Crumpled down into our borrowed blankets, waiting for a trace of taste to bring our senses alive again. This stillness creeps along the window sills leaving a trail of undisturbed dust. I have been waiting in the wings, wingless for the sound it brings. Flapping remembered hollow bones we hid inside our hollow homes. Building nests from twigs and emptiness. Watching ships go down all around, remembering names and faces but unable to put the two together again. You didn’t always look like this, I think. But neither did I. Ruining the purpose of why this all started, running on beaches barefoot. Screaming at waves and wishing away winters inside our skin. Cold, cold touch. Scars and streams of old tears. Iodine on scraped knees. Massive monsters under our beds. Not so scary now. Stacks of decisions we couldn’t make piled against the walls like insulation. I have a destiny shining in the cells of me. When my voice is faltering, I am somehow louder than your shouting. Preservation peels the layers of the time we knew these prayers, hand on heart, fist in fire. Giving all that taking requires. I will speak to the empty chair until there’s no one left to sit there.
Another human barometer, faith healing kilometer. Streets too tired for walking, empty pocket friends with wide smiles, highbrow jokes, broken plate piles. Universal theories of orphans and foreclosed notions of oceans. Hillside tirades, fencepost toasts to eloping coasts. Museums of glass and spells cast, feet sunk in mud. Anger above, small miracles like summer feeds, counted out like uneaten pomegranate seeds. Now where are the replacing spaces expanding, wheels and whenevers? Translucent choices, bar-tending voices, lockets of lunar eclipsing noises. Debts and denunciating hating, currents and currencies. Homemade epiphanies, sharps bones, silent ceremonies. Amassing almosts, green lights and sword fights with slicing lights. Rescued arithmetics, chest pains and swollen veins. Medicinal arsenals, proofreading prophets, carcinogen commutes between river banks. Bankrupt breakfasts, meals made for missing. Halfway to the heyday of running away. Scrolling sand subtitling the writing on the walls. Blessings like breadcrumbs lining the halls. Echo-locution, electrocution, buzzing fingerprints spell out a solution. Tentacle teaching, amputated reaching. Retire the wires that broadcast the preaching. Vampire villains, healthy and willing to mistake the marrow for a feeling more filling. Staring stairs we climb to unwind the time we slid through the windows and screamed to the sublime. The best generations of a widowed mind are mad enough to pantomime the shame of thinking there’s no such thing as a victimless crime in war time.
If we sat in bars, grimaced at bad service, napkins on our quivering laps. If we rushed into and out of traffic, rainstorms, apartments, appointments. If no one looked or noticed, cared if we ever unpacked the boxes, hung up pictures on the walls, rode elevators up and down just because. If we played pianos badly, sung off key, went to church half drunk, stumbled home with souvenirs, bled a little to make it more real. If we started over, met under mistletoe, wrote love letters, spent nights on the phone across oceans. If we sold old things and traded our shoes for something bare and new. If we sat on stairs looking at stars, playing broken-stringed, broken-necked guitars. Read long books, threw ringed rocks in rivers, stole sand and scattered it on floorboards of strangers cars. Took baths in big claw-foot tubs, told lies, listened for coyotes. Painted portraits of the people we once were or might be still becoming. If we made it look easy, ate cake at midnight, wrote words on skin, failed to notice important things, sometimes went hungry, had nightmares. If we laughed when the electricity went out, locked our keys in the car, baked pies, slept back to back, tore old clothes into tourniquets. If it took years to get it right, would it be called love?
