Creative.

Creative.

I've been trying to do a little more creative writing lately. I am so far from the writer I would like to be, or, even more frustratingly, the writer that I sometimes think I am, while flickers of an image or a story quickly slip away from me as I sit paralyzed at the keyboard, unable to translate. A few months ago, I started writing (in fact, I even got halfway through) a story but have recently concluded it is a big suck. Sorry to everyone who read bits and pieces or even entire chapters (or the whole thing, Sarah). Maybe one day I'll wrap it all up and we can resolve some cliffhangers. Regardless, the time I spent on that story was an amazing experience, and it probably improved my writing. Mostly, it just felt good to create and besides a major screenwriting contract (wherein I have a clause to oversee the soundtrack too), that's really what I want out of writing.

Then I started wondering about what I could do in a blogging space. First there's the obvious problem I have that whenever I get remotely inspired and try to be fancy with words, I end up just talking about music. But we also have to contend with the boundaries of a blog: public, supposedly unfiltered, and supposedly real life, non-fiction. I have written some pretty obscure stuff on here, mostly because I was burying something significant at the time and needed an outlet, an anonymous outlet. For better or for worse, this blog is nowhere near as anonymous as I had originally intended, and only occasionally does that really bother me. Usually it's a blessing, in more ways than one, to the point that basically everyone I know [but am not related to] knows it exists. If you tell my parents I will cut you. But because this outlet is no longer anonymous I just had to make what I painted on the canvas unrecognizable.

[There was also the time a few days before I got married where I clearly didn't think to sugar coat with "creative" obscurity, writing, and I quote, "all my friends hate me and only talk about themselves."]

And on the other hand, sometimes I just want to pull something out of thin air.

Anyway, there's one thing I hate more than blogging, and it's blogging about blogging, so I won't speak of it again (tonight). So without further ado I think I might start peppering this "website" with random little dalliances in creative writing, tiny outbursts of fiction (however ambiguous), little practices (however excruciating).

***

This is a conversation she didn't have with me.

"I love it when the moon is like this," I said without pointing.

But she couldn't see anything, squinting through the windshield in search of some giant, pink, low version, the type of moon that usually makes her breath catch. Finally, she caught sight of it. A tiny slice of crescent, thinner even than the silver wedding ring draped around her finger, flashing in matching intervals with the overhead street lights.

"Oh, I almost didn't see it," she answered clumsily while her thoughts were flooded by the greatness of so delicate a moon and the greatness of me watching it too, next to her. She wanted to say more, to own the beauty in the sky, to share it with me somehow, but she held it captive.

Then, it was gone again, behind a building or even a leafless branch. It was, after all, easy to hide.

She drove away from that moment hoping I just assumed that my love for the moon was profound enough to silence her, not that she didn't care. About it, about me. Or, she tried to hope that I didn't think anything of it at all and that should probably be her best option.

Later she stood close to me outside the tall building that somehow still felt low-slung and wide, the night quiet and easy between us.

"I'm drawn to you," she wanted to say, and the air was no longer easy. The remaining few trickled out, sometimes greeting us but sometimes hurrying past, her thoughts excited and proud that someone might think there was something between us. We talked hushedly about meaningless things, things which could have been overheard but maybe both she and I craved the whisper.

She didn't want to talk about meaningless things.

And she didn't want to say goodnight first. She didn't want to leave. But perhaps even moreso she didn't want me to say goodnight first and have to respond quickly and awkwardly with something like, "oh yeah, sure, I should get going too," so she did say it first. But this is about what she didn't say. And what I then couldn't say back to her.