But then I didn’t

I think in blog posts whenever I feel compelled to write. I try to start with a title but if it doesn’t come I don’t fuss too much, even though the creative beauty of a concise title is often superior to much of what I churn out. Then an opening sentence has probably formed in my mind even as I come up with the title (or, if I don’t have a title, I have a sentence waiting in its place that’s great but too long/inappropriate as a title for other reasons) and it spills out of my fingers. It isn’t always miraculous but feels, to me, meaningful or pithy and catchy or gratuitously clever (or even regularly clever without puns that make you want to spew) — rarely is a title purely descriptive.

The sentence shapes the first paragraph, which tends to go on until I run out of linking sentences, at which point I begin a new one. Or, sometimes, ideas will be separated into paragraphs (as anyone who tells people how to write will advise). Sometimes (other some-times, for there are many) I’m spilling words onto a page and don’t want to break the line in case it stops. That’s why poetry feels pretentious: the idea that ideas will readily transcend lines is steeped in artifice. I can’t look back a sentence or it all fades away and momentum is lost forever. The present sentence is all that can be re-read (perhaps that explains my long sentences?) and even that… well, sometimes extensive punctuation (my overused parentheses bow politely) demarcs boundaries not to ever be transgressed.

But then I felt like writing and the idea faded, or was fulfilled, and the want to share faded to invisibility. As did the inertia of words, it all rolled to a stop. Tiredness met experience and writing, all of a sudden, was not the same as remembering, living. And whilst text can creatively extend so many things, sometimes it isn’t a matter of extension or sharing at all. Some things, no matter how they are thought, are not for writing, blogging, publishing, and never will be.