What?

Five posts, I tell myself. Squeeze them out. Write about … what? The pigeons that visited the yard – two of them, and finding what? Pecking – at what? About the empty bird feed holder hanging from the washing line (empty because the seed I bought held insects that hatched and when the bag was opened flew out and I threw it away). About … what? As though I could crack the egg of the day. As though I could tap it and crack it open to release – what?

I was reading just now in the other room. Reading, on the bed without covers, without sheets, on the fur of the electric blanket, about – what? Too long ago. ‘Just now’ is too far away. Enough the thought of ‘the other room’. On the other side of the glass. The other side of the bevelled glass window someone put between living room and bedroom. Another room … is there really another?

To cross a room, that’s already enough. To have remembered it, crossing a room. Wasn’t that the miracle: a completed action: to cross a room? I’ve forgotten the other room, and what I was doing. The fur of the electric blanket. The abandoned book. This room is all there is. This room and crossing it, to write about crossing the room.

And even that is too much. Here – at the desk, level with the yard outside. Here – what happened before getting here? Before the arrival? How did I get here? Until I reach the moment just before writing. Having forgotten everything else, the other moments separated from my life, sliced from it. Everything but … what?

But the desire to write. To write – what? The question, what? The question that prompts writing, and that something is kept by writing. Squeeze them out, some posts, I tell myself. 5 posts, that’s what the day deserved. 5 – to remember – what?

The desire to write, 5 times. The desire to come from that room into this. To cross the room. To pull up a chair. To begin – what? To write? Was that it?