Back at the desk, the cursor hasn’t moved. The cursor has been blinking this entire time with a patience I find personally insulting. I crack my knuckles. I roll my neck. I do the thing where you breathe in for four counts and hold it for four and let it out for four, which I read about in a different article, one I also didn’t write, by someone who presumably met their deadline.
In for four. Hold. Out for—
The breathing is supposed to make my mind go quiet. Instead my mind, given a clean and silent room, immediately puts on a show.
What if you wrote the whole article as a letter to your future self.
What if you’ve been pronouncing the word “epitome” wrong your entire life.
You have, by the way.
Xaviar wouldn’t be intimidated by a cursor,which isn’t even relevant, Xaviar can’t read, Xaviar is fictional and also illiterate, and somehow that’s the thought that gets me to open a new browser tab and look up whether dolphins sleep with both eyes open.
They sleep with one eye open. Half their brain stays awake. I think about that for a while. Honestly, same.
I close the tab. I close the laptop. I open it. I close it again.
Well. That’s not working, clearly.
So I do jumping jacks.
This is a method. I swear.
I’m not just a woman doing jumping jacks in her living room at eleven on a Wednesday in her socks. I’munsticking the article.The blood goes to the brain. The body moves and the words follow. I’ve solved at least four of my best opening paragraphs mid-jumping-jack. The downstairs neighbor has filed a noise complaint about exactly one of them and it was worth it.
Five. Six. Seven.
“You don’t get it,” I tell Gerald, slightly winded, on the upswing. “Most people would just — write — the article.” Eight. “But most people — don’t have — myprocess.” Nine. “My process is — superior.” Ten. “My process is also — why I — have to do — this.”
Eleven. Twelve.
I’m starting to actually feel it, the loosening, the thing where a sentence starts to go together in the back of my head —something something we didn’t stop wanting connection, we just rerouted it through a screen because the screen never tripped over a tree root— okay that’s not bad, that’s actually not — keep it, keep it, don’t lose it —
I stop, mid-jack, arms still half up, to grab my phone and type the sentence into my notes before it evaporates.
And while my arms are up and my thumbs are moving and my whole stupid brain is finally,finallyaimed in the right direction—
I notice the corner.
The far corner. By the bookshelf, behind the chair I never sit in, under the shelf with the books I keep meaning to read.
There’s nothing there.
That’s not the part. There being nothing there is normal. Corners are where nothing is supposed to be. That’s their whole job.
The part is that the nothing is — wrong. The light from the window is doing its usual eleven-a.m. thing, falling across the room in that flat way, catching the dust, catching the spine ofJennifer L. ArmentroutI will die before finishing. It falls across everything.
It doesn’t fall across the corner.
The corner is just a little darker than it has any business being. Not dramatically. Not like a shadow but it’s darker than it should be.
I lower my arms.
My phone is still in my hand. The sentence is still in my head but I don’t type it.
I look at the corner.
I’ve lived here three years. I have vacuumed that corner. I have lost a single sock to that corner that I never found, which at the time I blamed on the void in a joking way, the way you do.
