I have crazy psycho dreams. This, I’ve already confessed in prior posts. Lately, my dreams have involved writing. Because.I’m.Obsessed. Possessed?
In my dreams, thoughts gush from the tip of my favorite pen, flowing and filling blank pages. In my dreams, I type fluently with fingertips on home keys, tap-tap-tap, as automatic as blinking. In my dreams, I edit, slash, replace, rack my brain for precise words that combine to form a magical sentence. Prose that flows likes a favorite melody. Words that sing.
In my most recent dream, I gazed into my mother’s magical magnifying mirror, the mirror she drags on every road trip. (The mirror that weighs fifteen pounds.) I discovered my eyebrows were unruly, in desperate need of plucking. A few wild stray hairs grew here and there, undetected by blurred fifty-year-old vision. Undetected without help from the hulking amplifier.
As I studied these shapeless brows, I noticed each hair was not a hair at all. Each hair was a word. A teeny-weeny minuscule group of letters. Why had I never noticed?
As I carefully tugged microscopic words from between my eyebrows, I wondered, did other people realized these hairs were adjectives and adverbs?
With my tweezers, I plucked…
very
suddenly
the
small
important
was
just
seem
awesome…
Growing off to the side, I removed…
interesting.
Stray hairs. Stray words.
When I finished, I admired my clean, evenly shaped eyebrows.
I’ve been writing word by word, bird by bird, bean by bean, hair by hair… I’ve been editing word by word, bird by bird, you get the picture.
Today, I shall take a break and go outside to play.
talya
Musical Pairing:
I Can See Clearly Now, Johnny Nash
“So the writer who breeds more words than he needs, is making a chore for the reader who reads.”
― Dr. Seuss
