Something for you in Normal entries

I meant to write something for you; a love letter or a story of small dead things, the image of a small girl smiling her dark curls stuffed into a cloth cap or dried leaves between the pages of a book. I meant to write it for you and that’s the important bit. I know as well as anyone that meaning to make coffee and standing there stupid with water in one hand and grounds in the other as wildly different as apples and textiles. I am standing here stupid with paper in one hand and ink in the other.

I tried though; I went looking for my muse, the lost things. Now I’m frightened and am writing something altogether different. I can’t find the lost things here; I should have looked sooner. What defines a lost thing, what makes it a muse and just rubbish in an alley, is that it was precious once to someone. I didn’t read the velveteen rabbit until I was an adult and read the story to my kids. By then I knew the lost things. The story is dependent on the heart of the lost thing. My children slept I wept or perhaps I only meant to weep; standing stupid with my eyes in one hand and my heart in the other.

There are no lost things here; everyone knows where their things are and nothing is that precious. I might write that this is where things come to die except that I’ve come here. Neither gallows humor nor melodrama are very funny when you’re the one wearing the hood.

The original horror stories like the Bible or Bram Stokers Dracula are singular and narrow in scope. Bram Stoker wasn’t interested in who turned the count and Joe Genesis wasn’t interested in who turned God. The question itself demonstrates a lack of understanding. The horror isn’t in the becoming; it’s in the being. As a kid I imagined both God and Dracula invented themselves, became as they were from an intense need to become as they were, perhaps even telling themselves the sort of lie people tell themselves, that there was a need, a gap that needed to be filled. If I were a child again perhaps I’d think they both had meant to things differently and just stood there stupid doing things the same.

Oh. How jaded. I might not have meant it to sound that way, as though we’re doomed either through action or neglect to dance in the same circle eternally, immortal and fleeting, does the new phoenix carry the memory of her ashes?

I meant to write something for you. This was not it. Or it isn’t yet.