So I'm standing in the Campo de' Fiori in Rome. I like this place, a lot of the time. Like right now...I like it right now. It's a market right now, its open space occupied by stalls selling fruits, vegetables, spices, and thingsthingsthings to locals and tourists alike. The stalls are covered by enormous, square, white umbrellas, the likes of which I'd never seen until I came to Europe. Looking down from my apartment window, I can't see the ground for these umbrellas.
So I'm standing under one of them, talking to a stall-owner in my broken Italian, handing him coins for the onions I'm buying, and I can see, behind his head, the shaft of sunlight that comes down through the place between two of the huge white umbrellas. And in the sunlight there are raindrops.
And just for a second my lungs are not pulling in air. And then I can breathe again and I'm shoving money at the man and shouting "Grazie" and runningrunningrunning, out from under the umbrellas, past the front door of my apartment and I can see that it's open and spilling out people and that their eyes are full of the longing desperation that's rapidly replacing the blood in my veins. Seeing them, I can't help but to stop and laugh at them, with them. They're saying things to me, shouting things, my name and also other words that were already jumbling through my head.
And then everyone's putting up umbrellas and we're all rushing, slipping across newly-wet cobblestones together, heading northeast along familiar streets, our excitement bubbling up through our lips in the form of inane comments about where we're going and why.
And then we're there, it's there, right in front of us, looming and beautiful and glowing with an unshakable glory that has stood the test of two thousand years in a city that knows no end of turmoil. And our hearts are poundingpounding in our throats as we push through the crowds clogging the entrance and slide across the marble floor with our eyes lifted in anticipation.
And, oh gods, it's a building that never lets me down. On any given day, its majesty pulls my heart up into the air with an indescribable soaring leap. But that feeling hardly compares to how I feel now, staring up at the rain falling in through the beam of sunlight let in by the enormous hole in the ceiling, the oculus. The rain straight down, the beam of sunlight at an angle, shining a spotlight at a place on the inside of the coffered dome. Seeing this fulfills a longing I didn't know I had, that's been in my heart since my life began, fulfills it in a way that completely surpasses any expectation I've ever created for anything.
So I ignore the tourists chattering in a dozen different languages around me. I ignore the wooden barriers that have been placed around the very center of the circular room to stop these same tourists from slipping on wet marble. I wiggle through a gap between two barriers, slide into the center of the enormous circle, lift my chin, and let the rain fall on my face in the most beautiful way it ever could.

Writing is so weird for me. It's constantly happening to me. My brain is a perpetual narrative, either cataloging something that is happening to me, something that has happened, or something that might happen. Sometimes something that fits into none of those categories.
And I'm walking down the aisle in the grocery store and I'm scanning the shelves, so many colors, and my stomach is a chasm of hunger and my brain is saying, "And I'm walking down the aisle in the grocery store and I'm scanning the shelves, so many colors, and my stomach is a chasm of hunger and my brain is saying..."
And it's odd. Because I'm thinking about what I'm doing, and thinking about writing what I'm thinking, and now what I'm doing is writing what I was thinking, which is, incidentally, also what I'm writing about, and what I was thinking about.

Does that make sense?

The point is, I've come to grips with the narrative thing. In fact, I'm sure it's the case for many writers. I deal with it by taking what I've thought and adding things to it, to describe situations more accurately, more kinetically. This, what I'm writing here, is more like my raw thought transferred to the page.

The one thing my brain covers oh-so thoroughly, the one thing that needs no embellishment, is disaster. Disasters of all kinds fall under the "things that might happen" category of my persistent narrative. Incidentally, they also fall under the "things I never feel the need to write about because they make me shiver in a horrified way" category of my life. I was going to give an example, but the horrified shivering thing just interfered. Suffice it to say that I dislike walking up concrete steps. I'm an awful klutz, I trip a lot, but my good reflexes tend to make up for it. In my head, I trip five times as often, and my reflexes don't exist. I suppose it's interesting to see so many scenarios laid out in my head, but I often wish they could be just a bit more pleasant.

New plan: If I'm procrastinating and I can't make myself work, I will at least be writing.

I can't tell you how many hours I've spent with this necklace draped across my hands, each of my fingers holding a length of it apart from its fellows, my fingernails digging deep into a knot of its tiny, filament-thin links.

I haven't even had the necklace for very long. It came into my possession last summer, when I walked into my mother's bedroom only to find her sorting through a shoebox of sparkling metal and colorful plastic, jewelry collected throughout her life that had somehow fallen into obsolescence along the way.


....tbc