Every, every minute

I can't do it, which is to say I can't not do it.  I thought I could just stop writing, but I suppose it would be like if I said I was just going to stop reading.  Or speaking. 

I almost said "Or breathing," but that's B.S.  More like "Or brushing my teeth."

Here it is: I don't want one day to flow into the next.  I don't want to suddenly realize a year has passed, or a month, or a week, or a lifetime. "Time flies."  I hate that saying.  I don't want time to fly.  Writing slows down time some.  You bottle up some moments so they don't all disappear.

See, I'm afraid I'll get Alzheimer's and not remember any of it.  I'm afraid Lyla or Rowan will die.  I don't want to lose their future and have squandered the details of their past because, poor me, I needed a break from writing.  It's compulsive now. 

I'll loosen my rule about the daily photo and my rule about posting every single day.  I'll try it out.  If something happens that makes me laugh or makes me mad, I'll write it.  If there's nothing noteworthy, I won't write. 

But see, that's the thing: It's all noteworthy, isn't it?  I've been teaching the play Our Town, by Thornton Wilder, for five years now.  In Our Town, a young woman named Emily dies in childbirth and only in death realizes that we humans are tragically blind about how fleeting our own lives are.  We live as though we have all the time in the world, when in actuality each person's life is an hourglass where only the bottom half is visible.  How much sand remains in the top half?  We live as though it doesn't even matter. 

The newly dead Emily asks the omniscient Stage Manager, "Does anybody ever realize life while they live it?  Every, every minute?"

"No," he replies tersely, then adds, "Saints and poets maybe…they do some."

I'll never be a saint, but I can try to be a poet.  At least a shitty one.