844. The Real Meaning of Words

When I haven’t written for a while, my brain starts to do dolphin flip somersaults in the waters of anxiety.  I tell myself I will have time for what I love later today, or tomorrow, or most definitely by next Tuesday.  I predict that work will slow down, or the house will clean itself, or the kids will make their own dinner. 

Somehow, none of those things happen.  I want to open up my calendar and split the days into layers, unearthing secret days within the others, like a scientist splitting the atom.  If only there was an extra 24 hours camouflaged behind the standard-issue Mondays, maybe a day just for me:  MOVday. 

I would take this clandestine day and hug it tightly to my chest.  I would whisper gratefully, Now I will write.  The day would smile back at me, knowing that writing would give me back what the dishes and the errands and the must-attend-meetings had stripped away: sanity. 

I would sit at the computer and let my fingers tap away merrily at the letters, the imprints of my fingers worn into humanized divots on the hard plastic keyboard.  I imagine myself as a concert pianist, practicing for an audience of one—tap-tap-tippety-type-tap.  The music of my typing soothes me as I lose myself in my words. 

I recount a recent funny incident, or make up a story, or just ramble.  It doesn’t matter.  What matters is I am here, seizing this minute, this hour, this day for my own radical purposes.  I no longer abandon my inextinguishable desire to write into the recesses of the laundry hamper, like a forgotten sock.  This time is for me. 

And when I finally stop, I re-read my story, correcting a word here, adding a sentence there, polishing and finessing until the story tells me I am done.  The words blink up at me, it is their turn to be grateful.  The completed paragraphs temporarily blind me, like fluorescent diamonds sparkling in the sun. 

MOV

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trifecta writing challenge.  the required word is:  "radical", exactly 333 words