I love the feeling of fullness and satisfaction that comes after you’ve finished reading the final sentence of a book that you anticipated for a long time and which turned out to be completely worth the wait, when you slowly close the cover and hold the book in your hands, sitting still for a moment while your brain reluctantly returns to the present, leaving a small part of itself forever among the characters and events you’ve been so deeply involved in and with for the last however many days ago it was you plunged in and knowing that it will be a long time again before you can meet them once more and find out what happens next.
Up late reading and woke late this morning, to lie in bed and read some more. I read at the table while I ate (alone as my mother drilled it into my head how rude it is to read at the table when others are present) and after I’d fed the kids and then again when we returned home from an afternoon shopping in town. Anders is gone for the evening, out with the boys for dinner; a group of men that he grew up with and who have met for dinner every few months for something like 15 years. We moved around too often when I was very young for me to keep the friends of my childhood and years and distance have stretched thin the connections to the friends I’ve accumulated over time. Now my friends here and I are building something similar but our beginnings are not shared in the time before we were adults, with a knowledge of parents and families and school and growing pains and first loves and neighborhood hijinks to cement us together.
How do you decide what to write about when you sit down to journal or blog? I’ve written and deleted so many sentences and paragraphs in the past 15 minutes that I feel like my brain is on permanent backspace. It’s so seldom that I sit down with a pre-conceived idea of what I want to say. Too often, it seems I just start typing and if I’m lucky (or you are, actually) I end up with something worth pushing the “Post Entry” button for.
Maybe I should have tried bulletpoints, eh, Sam?