Writing in Your Notebook Is How You Hold Yourself Close

A few days without a laptop.

Hi friends.

I drove ten and a half hours on Monday to get back to New Orleans from my travels further east. I had split that same drive into two days on the way out of town but it was one of those moments where if I could not bear the thought of spending another night not in my own bed, in my own home.

Is there a thing as too much travel? When I was younger all I wanted to do was roam. The idea of sitting still seemed like a cop out to me but also secretly intimidating or perhaps scary. To decide on just one place to live meant, to me, I had to decide on just one thing I wanted to do with my life. The hardest task.

Because while I have always written it took a long time for me to realize that it was even possible that I could be a writer, as in that person who would focus all their energy and time on that thing which I loved so much. To try to do the thing you love for a living, or even partially so, felt terrifying and impossible and also what did it even look like? Surely not the thing we saw in the movies, someone furiously typing away, or perhaps cocking their head in an attractive fashion, a pencil raised to their lips. Even with a thrilling soundtrack to it all.

The reality of course it is a very quiet existence, which is fine. (There is, I guess, a soundtrack, but it is often the same handful of albums I have been playing on repeat since the early 2000s.) The reality is just reading, reading, reading, when one is not writing, writing, writing. (Or staring out the window. Or lingering in the kitchen for another snack.) The reality is so extremely boring in its physicality I understand why they never told us what it all really entailed.

But oh, the way the mind blooms all day long. It’s really a lovely feeling.