What happens, first, is that she is staring at this:
… for what feels like hours, and then, she finally turns her head, and stares at this:
… and the thing is, it’s all there but why won’t it fucking come out?
She eats chocolate (do you see the evidence?).
She should go for a walk. She should call a lover. She should do laundry.
She should at least get up, for five minutes, stretch her legs. Stand up and bang her head against a wall literally rather than metaphorically.
She gets up. And, oh. She looks at this:
Oh. She sees something she looks at every day that she’s never seen before.
She lets words go, and starts to play with pictures. Images. There’s a slideshow whirring in her head, and she chases images. In this moment, it’s much easier than chasing words, because she wants the words to be GOOD–and that’s paralyzing her–and she doesn’t care what the pictures are, she just wants to catch them.
Snap, snap. Alter. Crop. Tighten. Ha. Look:
Oh, I’m not done yet. This is the point at which procrastination ends and art starts. It’s actually about this one:
All the pieces of me, scattered. But, together. Like in my storyboard…
You: Um, did’ya notice you just switched your narrator from third person to first person?
Me: Hush. There is always reason to my madness.
And I do all sorts of things with it, and it does all sorts of things with me, and I forget about the BLANK screen and the storyboard from hell and my aching eyes-back-and-head and I play, play, play.
I let myself get silly. I make a collage:
Angst recedes. I whirl. I text a lover. No words. Just a picture. Of my storyboard, which is, to my mind, much more naked than the most seductive posed selfie.
In a perfectly crafted fictional narrative, the next and final sentence would be, “I write.” I don’t. I read some poetry instead. But it feeds me. My own words will come out… tomorrow.
mjc
m jane colette 