I do a lot of my uninterrupted thinking in the shower. I stand there rocking back and forth to get the most of the hot water and think...about everything. I can’t explain how my mind works; I go from one thing to another and there’s really no rhyme or reason to how I get from point A to point B. Just a few minutes ago my thoughts covered all these things: how to redecorate the bathroom, what we are going to do about our financial situation, why I stopped writing, how I’m going to lose weight, how weird it is that my sexual fantasies don’t feature myself in a starring role anymore, my recent parenting faux pas, why I’m suddenly okay with being done having kids, if that will change, how other people have much cooler lives than me, and it went on from there...

My main thoughts were about the writing. Because a very cool friend of mine has been writing, I’ve started wondering why I stopped and how I came to a point, now, where I don’t feel such a pull to write. I used to write constantly; short stories, poems, even the beginnings of a couple novels. Now I guess it’s not a priority. At night as I’m falling asleep a few lines of a poem or story will start out in my head, but by morning they’re gone. I know they were there; like when you lose a tooth and keep pushing your tongue to the gap, thinking something should be there. So I sit down to try and pull it out of my head, to try and remember. As if it were the beginnings of that poem, the one that I’ve been wanting to write forever. But the words that come are somehow hollow. Not quite the ones that came to me the night before, not as grand, not as filled with potential. The feeling is similar to the one you get when you revisit childhood memories, that turn out to be not as magical as they once were. I’ve found through experience I’d rather keep the magical memories than relive those same things through adult eyes. I guess I need to look at those late night epiphanies the same way, and not try to recapture them. That or keep a notepad beside my bed. ;-)