Spinning Gold From Straw

Even though, even though no one is here but me, I am in my office. My office is not an office at all, but was the original kitchen of this house and in the two incarnations before I moved here, was an artist's studio and Connie May Fowler's writing room.
I have my mermaids here and my pictures of Johnny Weismuller and artwork made by my children and many Fridas and some Madonnas as well as a few pinches of ashes wrapped in blue cloth which are true holy relics of my friend, Sue.

The last time I was in here was last week and Freddie was filming me sitting at the desk.

"Just write something," he said, and I grabbed a yellow legal tablet and a pencil and I wrote these words because they were what my character would have written:

"I think the world has come to an end and I have no idea where anyone is. My phone doesn't work. I don't know where my husband is. I don't know know where my children are. I feel so helpless. If anyone finds this I hope they'll find my family and tell them that I've died. Who will bury me? I have so many questions and..."

And that was the last writing (and the first) I've done in here in a very long time.

But today, when I got home from rehearsal, I was overcome with the need to open a document I'd started writing a long time ago. Just the barest fingernail sliver of a story which had come to me in yoga one day, inspired by the real story of another woman in the class. And I wanted to do it here, in this room which is My Own.
A room of her own. Every woman needs one. Every woman deserves one and wouldn't you know that by the time she gets one, she probably doesn't need it so much?

And yet, even though the children are gone and my scissors and glue and pads and pens are safe from their grabbing hands (not to mention my skirts and shoes) it still means something very powerful to me that I have this. This room of my own.

And when I am out here, writing on something, it is symbolic to me of having an entire world of my own which I, and I alone, can make up and do with as I please. I am surrounded by my totems, my magical objects which are meaningful to me due to both memory and designation and they would have little meaning to anyone else. I sit in a chair I bought at a thrift store on a pillow I bought at an antique store and I put my feet up on an old MacBook box. I have a tiny fenced-in yard out the window and I have a fan which could blast me out of that chair if I put it on high.

And so I came out here this evening and I opened the document and I was intimidated by that tiny sliver of a story but I kept giving myself permission to write the worst book ever written (which is very good writing advice, I think) and even though I am rusty beyond belief at story-writing, I kept at it for a good while.

It's funny. Ever since I read my first real book (and what WAS that? Little Women? Marooned on Mars?) I have always thought that I would grow up to write fiction and yes, I have written some. But when I found the blog and the blog found me, my appetite, my hunger for fiction-writing has dissipated some. Maybe, perhaps, I was not put here on earth to write fiction. Maybe I was put here on earth to write about, well...whatever it is I write about.
I don't know.
But I do know this- when I sit down and start writing a story, something happens which I can't explain and the hands on the clock fly without me knowing it and I know I love it.

Well. Who knows if I'll write anything out here again for months? This life, this life that I chronicle here daily is so full and so busy and there is always a list of "shoulds" longer than my arm and there are always a million reasons not to settle into this chair in this room of my own where my mermaids and Fridas and Madonnas and ashes and pictures live. The world certainly doesn't need another worst book ever written. Believe me.

But just as I wrote those words on that legal tablet while Freddie filmed me and they were the words that another woman in different circumstances would have written, this is the place where other words come to me of other worlds, other lives not my own.

And if I need to do that, I have the place to do it. I do not feel so frantic about it anymore. I am not sure if that is good or bad. I only know it is what it is. And if anyone needs any proof that I am the luckiest woman in the world, they need only walk into this old kitchen where I keep my most magic of magic.

When I am showing the house to people for the first time, I hesitate before I open this door. I really don't like sharing this room at all. It is mine in a way that nothing else is. I open the door, I say, "And this was the original kitchen of the house," and I let the person look around for a second and then I shut the door back again.

Maybe I am thinking that if I let people into this room, they will steal my magic. Or, perhaps I am afraid they will think that despite having this magical room, I am nothing but a pretender.

I don't know. But here I am, tonight. And it has been something, this simple exercise of taking nothing and making something out of it with nothing but my mind. Making something as real and as fantastical as a freshly-laid blue egg in my palm.

It may well go nowhere but it has been a good few hours and I am most grateful for that.