You bend and you bend and you bend and then…

Or, Is it okay to still be sad?

I’m sitting at my kitchen table, computer open, Google document blank and full of potential, looking at a writing prompt: Make a List. It sounds simple, and really, it begins that way. I jump in without too much thought. Lists like “Things I’m grateful for” or “Favorite ways to spend a day” and other concrete items—“low hanging fruit” as writers like to call it—flow out of me easily. Then the next prompt pushes us to think more abstractly about our lists, beyond tangible but still visceral, which, if you can do that in words, you’re really on to something. I look up around my kitchen, willing the walls or the cabinets or the objects on the counter to give me inspiration, but when my eyes return to the computer, the cursor still blinks at me.

Things that scare me? Too cliche.

Things I need? Too navel gazey.

Things I want? Nah.

Items in my pantry? Hardly worth mentioning.

All the things I wonder about? Well, that could be something, I have lots of questions.

I look over at the gallery wall of my home, and see the smiling faces of all of my children in gorgeous 11 x 14 framed images. What I hope for my children? That could be meaningful.

And then—it feels like it is out of nowhere, but inspiration is never really out of nowhere—I get it. A peculiar idea for a list, certainly, but the one I’m compelled to make, the one that forces me to search for details up higher in the trees, above all that low hanging fruit, where I can’t reach from where I’m standing but have to climb in and explore, move branches around, look under and over and through.

Things that are near even though they are distant. Yep. That’s the one I want to work with.

One might initially take this prompt in a nostalgic direction, starting with something like “The hearts of my kids because I’m always holding them with me.” Cute, right? But not at all where my mind is going. The “precious” phase of my writing (and my life, I might add) ended long ago. I begin, wondering where the list I really want to write will take me, where the sparks will lead.

Things that are near even though they are distant:

1) The conversations I cannot fully grasp, but can hear whispers of, in the coffee shop around me.

2) Memories of my marriage. I’m trying to keep them distant, but they are never distant enough.

And then, another image comes to mind. One that is obvious only to me. The thing that is always nearby, always in my ears, always on my mind, always taking up space in my heart, always making me worry, wonder, stay ready for anything. I could be sitting in a silent house, on an airplane a few states away, in the middle of a podcast interview with headphones on and wonder if I hear it in the distance when, of course, that’s impossible. But it’s there, it is always, always there.

3) My son’s screaming.