Malayalam

Wow. I can’t help feeling like…
Prepare yourself. Don’t you want to be sad, to be moved, to understand something. Aren’t you hoping this will touch you? Don’t you want to relate to this, to see yourself in these words, to relate to art? Who then will make it?

I learned a new palindrome longer than the rest, and I’m only interested because Cortazar said something about them. Maybe they helped him sleep, like the cigarettes and the mate’ and the company he kept. I bet you sleep like a child when you write like he does. There’s honey on the handle of my cup and it’s spreading from my fingers to the letters to the insides of other fingers but I don’t feel like anything is sticking.

I finally turned the water faucet handle off. I heard it dripping and I told myself I would turn it off as soon as I got a chance, but I forgot three times. I finally turned it off. Now I miss it. I wish music played as soon as I stopped writing. My paragraphs need a coda not made of words. Then they’d set themselves apart from the rest. Water dripping would do it but if it were a part of my writing I would not turn it off. The honey is sweet and I wish I could play piano.

That’s what I was thinking. I was sitting on my front steps, waiting for cars to go by and I was thinking these exact things. I thought we should look up more as humans. I mean it literally as well as metaphorically.

Do flies have an ethereal quality? I kill a lot of them like a fool. I do plenty of other things that do not pay tribute to the ethereal qualities of my life. I don’t look up enough and I don’t pick proper times to repeat myself. Stories hinder creativity in my book. Stories are so easy to tell but to tell them I need to block all of the other things that run to my fingers. I’ve tried typing with gloves on but these things still find their way through. They bleed through the gloves and leave the keyboard a mess. They seep through the fabric and switch the position of the letters. They turn letters backwards because it’s the only way to make the words interesting. They over compensate for my lack of creativity and try to make up for my bad spelling. They create grammatical errors that I am capable of myself. Instead of gloves, I devised a method of typing with a system of pencils. The eraser side is attached to my fingers. This keeps a comfortable distance between the letters and myself. But, and I’m only trying to accurately describe this process, before I know it the pencils have reversed themselves. The cursor on the screen begins going in the opposite direction. This is inevitably when I write my masterpieces. I don’t see the cursor erasing the words. Instead I write as fast as I can, in an impulse that has the creative potential of a woman’s womb. After 3 hours I stop to reread the culmination of my perspiration. The screen is blank. The pencils have shaven themselves into small splinters of wood and on my hands written in lead are the remains of the first good thing I’ve ever written. The words are in a jumbled mess smeared from sweat and blood splintered like Jesus’ back, crucified to a cross made of yellow wood.

I started writing with a pen attached to the end of an umbrella. I’m just trying to write a story, but you know as well as I do, it’s just not possible. Writing a story censors all of the great things that are really being written in your head. You have to keep to the story. You have to keep the readers attention. How can you expect them to concentrate? Why are you still reading this? Why are you still reading this? You have to keep to the plot, the storyline, and the master narrative. I wrote for a long time trusting that the umbrella shield would catch everything and judging by the increasing weight of the thing I assumed it was working. The umbrella caught all of the things I wanted to write but couldn’t. Without catching these things the story becomes incoherent and seemingly random. It isn’t however. I took this umbrella filled with the filtered stories that ruin my coherency and dumped it down the drain of the faucet that had recently been turned off. In the steel sink the stories ran down the drain in search of a hair they heard Cortazar talking about finding in the depths of a sewage system. Having taken care of the problem I was excited to return to my paper. The words had been blocked because the open umbrella was blocking the paper so I was unable to see what had been written. I thought I’d read this story and hear the coda I have longed to hear towards the end of my story. It was no surprise to me that there was only one word on the paper. It was scratched into the paper, void of ink. I can’t play piano. The word was Malayalam. It's a palindrome. If you could see me now Mom, if you could see we won.