Write Now I Am: A Collection of the Year's First Sentences

Right now I am trying to breathe, write, chew gum and digest the sensation of being thrown off a cliff.

Right now I’m glad we’re writing even in a circle of two--- what did Jesus say about gathering in his name? We gather now in the name of Getting It All Out.

Right now I’m glad there are lights and fans and streams of running water, diesel in the tank, gas in the generator, milk in the fridge, people in the seats, my family right where I left them.

Right now I feel like a squatter in an occupied house, no vacancy.

Right now my feet are on solid ground, even if it’s solid ground on a boat out at sea.

Right now I’m shocked at the person I saw in the mirror this morning; a woman who went to DMV took out the recycling and updated the family health insurance plan all without any hail Mary’s or histrionics.

Right now I’m half in the head of the hunter who wants to kill a blind woman in the story I’m writing.

Right now I’m trying to figure out what to do while laughing at what I’ve already done.

Right now I don’t want to write about the exact same things I do want to write about.

Right now I am happy and full, perhaps too happy and too full, wrestling with the idea that I should be miserable and starving to produce anything good.

Right now I am glad to be out of the vortex I had no name for until Julie supplied it for me; it’s as if I’ve returned from Siberia to a Walmart All You Can Eat Buffet.

Right now my head is full of big nebulous, unformed possibilities rising up amidst the tiny seeds of details, burrowing down.

Right now I am thinking about the jugular and what it means to go for it; to go in for the kill, that moment when we can decide to duck and hide from the wild beast as it charges us or face it and pull it in to use it for our own purposes, for its own good, for the hide and the meat but also the life blood and the spirit.  

Right now, I’m in what feels not like a rut but on a plain, a long stretch of prairie with no peaks or discernable valleys just endless flatness, not accounting of course for the smaller ridges of rear ending the old lady, H swallowing mercury, the cat rolling in silly putty.

Right now I’m thinking about my friend saying, Let’s just marry each other, my friend who says the things I can’t.

Right now I am here but it feels like my frontal lobe is wrapped in a layer of saran wrap that has been folded under by a layer of tinfoil, rolled in mud, left out in the rain and then kicked down the street like a band of kids playing with a pebble.

Right now I’m thinking about my friend saying it’s like putting your baby in a seat on the rollercoaster without a seatbelt and hoping for the best.

Right now I’m wishing writing were more musical like composing or more physical like surfing but while we write we make the music and the motion happen even if it’s later through the voices and bodies of the characters we’ve created.

 Right now I am happy to be here at this table feeling I can at last properly use the word languid since it’s actually hot out and I’m dreamy, sad, prepared to clutch onto the good though it’s sometimes still so hard for me to let go of the bad.

 Right now I’m soft and blurry like a cup of tea with milk, aware of the rain, wishing I was in it, pooling in gullies, swirling down gutters, falling out of sky like a parachute shot down.

Right now I see myself sprinting through a bunch of big empty rooms trying to get from here to there, find the shortcut or the exit sign but no matter how fast I run I’m still where my feet are in the one room I can occupy at a time.

Right now I feel maybe for the first time that family is right up there with art.

Right now I’m reminded that I have a body with skin and blood and muscle and tendons connected to the stomach, the organ of appetite that demands the most attention of all, wanting to be full, to be fed, to be tended to like a starving baby bird.

Right now it feels like there’s a small orchestra pounding out joy right behind my collar bone- sheer weird, loud rambunctious joy and I think it’s because everyone has finally picked up their instrument. We may be out of tune, totally discordant but it doesn’t matter because the effect is a certain mad beauty, like all of the zoo animals and circus freaks and sideshow performers and grizzly old men operating the tilt-a-whirl and Ferris wheel have finally started to play at the same time.