Hunger

Stephen King says the secret to his fecundity is stability. He’s struggled with addictions, but his domestic life has been steady. I suppose a five-day absence from the keyboard isn’t so much stacked against the dissolution of a marriage, the loss of the defining relationship of one’s life, and of living alone for the first time, but how am I supposed to know what I feel about any of those things if I’m not writing about them?

For the non-writers: yes, it feels like that sometimes.

I haven’t written in five days, a stretch which feels like forever. When you’ve written long enough (apparently for me, dabbling since childhood followed by three-and-half-years of concentration is long enough) and you don’t put your thoughts on the page, they tumble over each-other like unanswered prayers in the mind of God. Right now, I want to deconstruct everything.

Biking.

Why Andi and I can’t be friends.

Lip Service.

The pathetic mating rituals of the shy and bookish.

The quaint milestones of living alone.

Choosing writing over breakfast.

This need to put the roiling emotions and jumbling thoughts into tangibles led me to chose writing over breakfast this morning. Big deal, I skip breakfast all the time, you say. If you know me, you know how I love breakfast. I wake up ravenous. If I eat one tremendous meal a day, I’d rather it be a pile of hashbrowns, eggs, toast, bacon, and pancakes than a steak-potato-veggie thing or a pile of pasta any day of the week. Any time of the day, for that matter. Brunch? Hell, yes. Brinner? Betcha by golly wow.

But this morning, I decided to splash some coffee on my grumbling gut and tell it to keep for a few hours. This is a milestone for me. I’ve known writing feeds something vital for some time, but this is the first clear manifestation, a biopsy confirming the diagnosis previously based only on symptoms.

Still, a breakfast burrito sounds amazing about now.