Enough Truth to Spill: An Evening of Writer's Strain

And so it began last night when I arrived back at Whittier School, my home for the next two days, where I have been residing basically half of this past school year.

It began on a couch, a rotten and rotting couch, already ancient, faded and pathetic when I inherited it seven years ago with my classroom. The cushions let you sink much too far down, the computer is uncomfortably warm on my lap, and there is too much synthetic stimuli all around, including Petco-purchased tetras toiling back and forth through green aquarium water that is both bright and dark green at the same time. There are laminated North Face ads spinning on fishing line from the ceiling, clusters of desks where worksheets, pencils, erasers, and rulers go to die.

I’m in the same room as my massive teacher's desk—a hulk surely from the ‘80s that is the home of too many papers, too many books, too many stacks of random school paraphernalia storing the potential energy of every one of my educational questions. All of my seven years of visions mixed in with seven years of disappointments and confusions, and the attempts to try again, day after day. I wrote a page, figure if I do that each day I’ll at least have the volume. Figure each day holds enough truth to spill.

And if I manage to make do in a room filled with too much of those circular suffocating memories, I feel pretty good about my chances when I let the windows open and allow the noises of the outside world to invite me instead.


Leaving Lake Iliamna ~ 04.15.09