Chaos and Two Sweaters

"I just realized I don't need to go to work for another hour," Jeremy says to me one morning. "So I could have been without pants this whole time."

I look at him, then down at myself and laugh. I'm wearing long pants and two sweaters. It's that kind of morning. Not cold, but not warm enough to reach me. So here I sit on the balcony in the sun, writing. Wearing two sweaters, sweatpants and Jeremy's aviators to take the edge off the page glare. One sweater is bright orange and the other red-and-blue striped. I must look a sight.

I'm finishing On a Crowded Floor today, a short story about Irish set dancers. It needs a couple lines tweaked, some further editing, then off it goes to a magazine. True, these 3500 words took me over four months to write, but the real accomplishment here is that I'm finishing something at all.

I'm moving across the country in a few weeks, to a place I may or may not like culturally but sweaters won't be necessary there which is frankly all I care about at this point. Between sorting books to keep or donate, organizing a quickly expanding ebook library, scanning mountains of old journals and notebooks, talking to apartment locators, filling out applications, and worrying about living for a stretch of time without a car (my blood pressure rises and one of the sweaters needs to come off so hey, worrying does accomplish something)—between all that I'm supposed to sit and focus and write. Fates. But I'm doing it, without exploding yet.

The sun now feels warmer and the second sweater comes off. I breathe for a moment and remember the sky and the birds and the ground—all still there. The chair holding me up. The pen in my hand. Chaos takes a step back. The books, the clothes to sort, the sink that still needs to be scrubbed, can all wait for a while. I'm writing now.

"Step through your resistances right now and write something great. Right now. This is a new moment." ~Natalie Goldberg