Maybe I’ll Write

“Wonder Aveline the Super Dog” has finally gone to sleep, Josiah is at a Sigur Rós concert, and I am here in a quiet house with a lovely plate of food and silence.

Maybe I’ll watch a movie, maybe I’ll write a bit more — not here, mind you, but elsewhere, and just for me.

Sometimes I think that’s the only way I’ll ever write a book is if I tell myself all the words are only just for me. Sometimes when I’m writing for you, I let you get in the way. Sometimes you scare me, and I let that fear change how much of the story I tell.

I’ll never write a book if I write it for you.

So maybe tonight I’ll write for me. Maybe I’ll finally open up that lonely document called Chapter One, and maybe I’ll begin it like this:

“I lived in the South the year I turned thirty. At least, I thought it was the south. It was well below the Mason-Dixon line. It dangled into the ocean, for crying out loud; wedged between the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic. But people said it wasn’t the real South. The real deep South, they told me, was further north. …”