This feels both mature and defeatist.
This is what I did instead.
This is what I did this weekend after boisterous karaoke on Saturday (Wonderwall with the whole crowd singing): I pulled my piano from storage.
It's been sitting in a box beneath the bed for eight months, and now it isn't. Now it fits nicely on top of the garage sale coffee table I re-imagined as a bookshelf. I dusted the keys and plugged it in. I found the pedal and the headphone adapter.
It wasn't the karaoke. It wasn't my friend who said You've got singer aura all over you. It was a month and a half ago, Friday night after disastrous Thursday. I had just had a glass of red wine spilled on my dress. I had just been insulted by a man at a party who thought I was drunk. I went upstairs and changed. I was very tired; I couldn't sleep. I needed a piano, and I found one in a high corner of the hotel, at the end of the hall, by the window. They didn't kick me out, the security guards, the hotel maids. They didn't kick me out. I played, and it was better. It being everything.
So tonight I played. Instead of getting my book together for a contest I will not win because I will not enter, I played.
I realize many of my songs don't have bridges. Or, they had a bridge but I took it out, hoping to write a better one, a more complicated, interesting one with buttresses and sculpted pigs, and now my fingers don't know where to go and so go everywhere. I realize my songs are a lot like my poems.
I realize when I'm lonely, when I'm tired, when I have had a disastrous Thursday, when I'm not wearing the outfit I had hoped to be wearing, when my poems are bad, when there are a lot of assholes about, I don't need television or heavy metal or a drink or junk food. It's not that hard. I need to do this.
Apologizing for this blog as it takes me away from my real work, a new acquaintance said, maybe it is your real work.
I would like to be a girl who finished a book. I would like to be a girl who let go of one she has already finished. I would like to figure out the formula and get it in the world, hear that click of parts locking.
Until then--or maybe instead--okay, this is me. This is what I do. This is what I'll be doing. I'll be here all week.
