timezone II

Monday, is that you?
Hello?
Monday, can you hear me Monday? Monday, is that you?

Yes, it's Monday.

I sat down at this desk on Sunday evening and now the streetcars and sun are about to arrive and usher in Monday in Toronto. I've written through the night for the second night in a row. I've written a lot, if words can be counted even when they're not snaking towards the end of the page. If working and reworking lines of type counts as much as the sheer filling of paper with ink. If, like gently stretching and smoothing an excess of pastry over the sides and base of a pie dish, turning 6906 words into 4438 words is a creditable achievement. Two nights of sitting up while the world around me sleeps, performing spells: the alchemy of editing. Taking rocks and attempting to turn them into gold. The impossibly hopeful process of trying to pinpoint the magic that will create something new and better by adding something and, by adding, will take something - baseness, profanity, ordinariness, mortality - away.

Yes, it's Monday and I've had a weekend of writing.

I've sent something off, I've got more to write. Books are propped all around me like small clusters of fruit at an outdoor market; photocopied and printed articles are slathered across my desk in an almost complete suffocation of its wooden surface. Pens are scattered with pot-it notes, bulldog clips, a phone and paper clips. If the paper that fills this small room could be fingerprinted, I'd be everywhere. I've thumbed through books and checked online. I've sat here over and over again, quietly tapping my head and biting my lip, the thing my body does when it's trying to find the right word. My shoulders ache, and my back feels like it did when I drove the 9 hours from St Louis to Fort Wayne last November. So much more to write, so many things to write, and... (someone called us feral today)... so big the reasons to write.

The first streetcar just rolled by as I typed. It's Monday.

Dishes are piled in the sink, I've been wearing lavalava or jeans all weekend, the bed can't remember the last time it was made, and words are rushing around and around in my head like coins around the yellow plastic fundraising funnels in shopping malls. I'm entranced, watching them circle, and I have no time for worldy things like kitchens, bathrooms and washing machines. These things will all wait, while I write. And write. And write.

Te tau okioki. The chance to write.