The Thing with a Name

Here I am at this page again, and again I can’t make myself stay. The reasons are nothing new. What I keep having to remind myself of is the more embarrassing fact underneath them: that I need something to say before I can say it. On the rare occasion I do turn up with something, a pressure settles over me—quiet, sure of itself, as if the silence had a claim on me I’d forgotten signing—and the sentence dies before it reaches the page. Something stops me. I’ve never worked out what.

I haven’t written in months. The guilt hasn’t taken the time off, though. It’s been feeding the whole while, and I’ve started to feel it as something with actual weight, growing, fattening on every day I let go past.

My evenings go one of two ways. Either I sink into something close to hibernation—the kind that resents being disturbed—or I find my hands some job to keep them off the pen and the keyboard: the guitar, a walk that goes nowhere in particular, the dead air of meditation. On the worst nights I do nothing but sit and look at the wall, half expecting it to look back. The one thing they all share is that none of them is writing. I know how that sounds. It hasn’t changed anything.

A few things have been gnawing at me lately, the slow and patient kind that’s in no rush to let up. And I still mean to keep the promise I made when I started this: to journal, and to get better by doing it. Better at writing, mostly. Fiction was the point, originally. So I should stick to it. I have to stick to it. STICK TO IT.

Part of the gnawing is a dream I had a few nights ago. Strange, and I’ll leave it there. What I can’t get past is the ending—or the fact that there wasn’t one. My alarm cut it off mid-image, and I’ve spent every day since worrying at the stump of it, dying to see the part I never got to. So I’ve made it a job: take the dream apart and build it the ending it never got. I’ve outlined it more times than I’d care to admit, and I keep coming back because it never sits right, or because some joint of it won’t bear weight no matter how I shift things around. I’m on something like the tenth try. Is that normal? I’d like to think it is.

This isn’t only the dream. A lot of what I write ends up in draft after draft, simply because I can’t stand the way I thought even a few days before: how I’d put things together, what I’d apparently been willing to believe at the time. Whoever wrote those earlier pages reads like someone I’ve lost touch with and was never quite sure I liked. I was made differently then. The person writing this wouldn’t have made those calls, and he knows, a little uneasily, that he won’t be the one who reads them back later. Does that make sense? I’m asking because the headspace I’m in right now is already on its way out. I can feel it going even as I write.

There’s a name for this. I know there is. I just haven’t cared enough to go looking for it, or to fix what it’d point to.

God help me.