just write

"What you need to do," she said, "is just write."

I looked at her, but said nothing, expecting more, expecting another lecture; instruction. She returned my look, but was silent in return. I felt a quick pang of annoyance; the familiar prick of emotion I always felt whenever I was told to do something I knew I should do.

"Oh, shut up!" I thought. I could hear the words; the mean-spirited words. I didn't say them, but averted my eyes, expressing as much. I couldn't look at her. Not feeling as I did. Pinned, caught, angry, afraid.

We had been speaking about writing. I had been prattling on about how much I thought that writing was the thing I should be doing, but I wasn't sure I knew how to do it; how to start doing it. I had said that my mind was always full of ideas but that I couldn't find the magic of the doing when she stopped me in mid sentence and said,

"What you need to do is just write." Calmly. Firmly.

And my response was to take a deep breath, which I quickly released. It came out as a sigh. A petulant sigh. A sniffy sigh. Her expression was impassive, neutral. Well, it would seem that way to someone who did not know her, but I could see the change. She had told me something honestly; with honesty. I had responded dismissively. Now, after listening to my whiny complaints, she was also angry. With me. We were both angry with me. 

I wanted to just stop everything. Freeze the moment, so I could think. So I could look at all the balls that had been tossed into the air between us and try to see what they were. To understand what I was feeling. Why I was feeling. To let the anger dissipate.

What she had said was plainly true. I knew it. I had long known it. But those simple words had sparked such a sudden, complicated barrage of feelings that seemed to come from so many different places, arose from so many experiences, came with so many unhappy memories. And they all intersected at me; my sense of me; reminding me yet again of my failure to be me.

"...just write..." She might as well have said that what I needed to do was climb a mountain every day; run five miles every day; dig a six foot hole every day.

She stood up and walked to the door, quietly, determindly, mutely. She began to put on her shoes. She didn't look back to me. I hated this. I hated when our times together ended this way; with anger and hurt. My mind buzzed incoherently. My chest ached. I was full of the need, the want to speak. The wish to be honest. With her. With me.

I watched through the window as she walked away. Then the words came.

"Just write. That's what you do, isn't it?" And I saw how we were different. She thought of herself as a writer. I did not. She wrote. I didn't. She defined herself. I was undefined.

I looked at the empty street and wondered if I would go after her and just tell her,

"That's what you do...you write."