After the insanity comes more

After the insanity of this year's NaNoWriMo, my mind has now quieted a little, and the dust has started to settle, and I can look out of my window to the world outside. Before doing the revisions, I will live a little, go out a little, call friends a little, send letters a little, watch movies a little. But I know that I shall always go back to the word processor, because that is what my heart always tells me to do.

Such is my life as a writer. It is measured not so much in terms of weeks, days, and months as in number of pages written, number of people met, found, and lost, letters mailed, number of movies watched and books read. Some things take center stage in my memory, some get relegated to the dusty cellars of heart and mind, some waver in the distance like a mirage, while some are entirely forgotten for some reason or other. This way, time not so much tick-tocks with such numbing regularity as trickles down and gushes forth in a highly irregular, plodding manner, now fast and now slow, now with such intense force and now with remarkable insipidity, depending upon the richness of the days and the kind of catharsis or neurosis that delving into the deepest darkest depths of humanity brings, as time, inevitably, moves on.


Deeper and deeper shall I go into my writing, finding things good and bad, subtle and blatant, awful and profound. I grow more and more confused, yet more and more enlightened. In my mind, thoughts and ideas and memories fly about like gnats over horse dung, careening towards each other and ricocheting off, canceling each other out and multiplying. I dig my heels in, hold my hands out for a handhold, and find nothing and everything.