I walk through the front of the house like the ghost that I am, weak and woozy, floating off of the prescription drugs for my inconvenient illness, and I cast my coasting eyes out the window into the dawning evening, the rain clouds teasing the dying, thirsty front lawn, dry and caked with dust, my feet carrying me like a floating leaf across the living room, and I watch as a car drives by outside on the cracking road, floating along with my sailing body as my feet pad the carpet, in perfect synchronicity, I am simultaneously one with the passing car, and the silence of the house subtracts the silence of the vast, outside air, the motor of the car muted under my drugged, sickened state, and as my feet sway nonchalantly beneath me, the car passes by in a tired silence and the equation has been shortened to a piercing pain in my head, and I have the sudden urge to write, to type my revolving, rotating, retarded thoughts, and I float to my computer in a drugged silence, like a waking dream, wanting, needing to write out my thoughts and invisible words that the passing, silent car drove me write, to word the words in a way that gives them life, a tangible reality, but of course the computer is off and I press the power button with a tired thumb, coughing up thorns of mucus as I do so, and wait impatiently for the screen to illuminate, but I can't let this thought fade un-worded, un-birthed, so I grab a lonely pencil and a thin piece of paper, segregated on my desk next to all of the electronic devices that really have no life or meaning to them, and I write:
There really is no appropriate first sentence, if you're stricken with the itching urge to write and have no subtle idea where to begin, you can do as I have done, and state that there is no appropriate first sentence. See what I did there? I solved the problem and have jumped clear across the mountain of the first sentence and have landed on my head into the moist valley of the rest of the text. There is also no need for correct grammar and punctuation, as long as you get the point across clearly. But of course, it is my superficialness to write with correct grammar and punctuation, because to me it looks appropriate. And did you notice that word, twenty-something words ago -- superficialness? That's not a word. But of course you understand the point attempted, the so-called story has progressed and I have conveyed my sense of superficiality -- see, now that is a real word. If you are going to spell words wrong, you might as well make clear sense of why and what you are misspelling.
I stop writing. This is nonsense. This is not the idea that I had. I set the pencil down and crumble up the piece of paper. I notice that the computer has turned on, finally, and I can type the idea that was left behind from the silent car passing outside from earlier, and I look out the window and suddenly realize that I had lost the idea, it had succumbed to the revolting nonsense floating around in my head, and I cough, and I look out the window, and another idea forms in my head, and I hammer knives into the carpet, trying to persuade a new, original form of suicide, one that may actually work, and after I finish hammering the knives into the carpet, blades upright and pointed in the air, I sit upon my bed on my knees, kneeling forward graciously, and just as I thrust myself off the bed headfirst onto the knives, the idea from earlier sprouts once again in my mind, as if I had never forgotten it in the first place, and then, like an illuminated light bulb, I can see the words type themselves on the paper: I walk through the front of the house like the ghost that I am...
![[send message]](https://www.writerscafe.org/images/mail.png){kind=small}
![[befriend]](https://www.writerscafe.org/images/friend.png){kind=small}
Share This
Email
Facebook
Twitter
Read Request
My Library
Flag Writing
