Today I'd like to do a five minute Friday for Lisa-Jo Baker's writing prompt here. Sad that her site had to crumple up and die before I started this, but honestly, sticking the link in a facebook comment thread seems a whole lot easier than linking to her site. Even though I've been a fan for EVAH, this is my first time joining.
And GO.
Some days the world seems so incredibly fragile. Not in a morning-dew-on-dandelion-puff way. More of a creeping-over-broken-glass-through-the-dark-barefoot sort of way.
Some days I am sure that every few hours (heck, every few minutes) something bad will happen. A plane won't fall on my house. That would be too easy. But the oven will die. And the cat will barf on the carpet. And the kids will poke each other with sticks I told them to throw in the garden but somehow they ended up back in the fenced yard I thought was safe enough that I could take 2 minutes to run to the bathroom and pee.
Some days this constant barrage of tiny failures wears at me in a way I can't figure out how to fix. Like the scratchy tag that will puncture the back of your neck 379 times in one morning until you're ready to tear off your shirt in the middle of Walmart and do your shopping half-naked. If it was a larger sort of broken, I could DO SOMETHING. But these minute little broken pieces of a day that should have gone well aren't anywhere in the mom's playbook.
Like my laptop. I'm a writer. Not just a facebook and twitter kind of writer. But a writer who makes money actually writing. So, I need my laptop. I need it to work. Not just sometimes, but all the time. The touchpad was stuck for weeks. Every few words the cursor would jump, sometimes erasing whole paragraphs, or sentences, or I'd find myself typing in the middle of some other scene. I had to stop, fix, begin again, then stop, repeat, begin again, until my train of thought has completely derailed and the muse has fled the room.
BROKEN. But not so broken I could throw it out. It was just a scratchy tag sort of broken, that endless small puncturing of my thoughts and words and pages until I wanted to give up.
And today I fixed it. I typed this post without a single skip or sudden deletion.
I have never felt so grateful. My hands feel generous and free. I never want to stop.
Joy and gratitude amid the brokenness of my life, because one thing that was wrong is now right.
STOP.
