I'm sure this blog post was as much to remind me of these things as it was to provide an answer to a question.

But.

Then I deleted the post both because it was boring and because I can.  When you are blogging (or really writing anything), you can just highlight it in blue, wipe it clean, and then you are back at the start.  There it is again:  The promise of a blank white box in which you can type anything you think of or care about or want to say.  

This is the beautiful part of writing.   The power and the possibilities.

Here is the question (or some variation on it) that I am asked most often:  

How do I finish my novel? 

Here is the answer:

One word at a time, you keep marching forwards until your characters have finished saying what they set out to tell you in the first place, the shadow of their acts making black marks on the whiteness in front of you.   These marks become the words that you pry out of yourself, one by one.  

If your characters had had nothing to do or feel or say, had no mark to make, they wouldn't be there in the first place, lurking around in your subconscious like kids who are left on a playground, waiting anxiously for their parents to come and claim them.

No one will claim them, because you are their parent.  Their only parent.  And until you figure out how to do it, they will be there, waiting.

Sometimes they will yell at you, other times you might forget they are there.

It is your job to tell their story and if you don't do it, they will remain where they are and you will remain what you are:  Someone who wants to be a writer but without the act of writing being involved.

We are HERE, they will whine, petulantly.  When is something going to HAPPEN?

You are the writer and nothing is going to happen without you.

No one else is going to tell their story.

Only you.

So claim them.

They are yours, after all.

There are no shortcuts to doing this.   There is no magic.   There is just YOU and your laptop and a thrice-reheated cup of coffee and everyone outside who is having a much better time than you because the sun is out and oh look, over there, you could be sitting in an adirondack chair, painted the perfect shade of blue, the feel of the sun on your skin, a cold drink beading its moisture coolly onto your eager hand.  Your head could be tipped back slightly and you could be laughing at something someone else said, then saying something yourself.  

You could BE a character instead of just making them.  

Maybe that would be better.

There could be a frisbee being thrown and a dog, sun-hot fur, pressed against your leg.

But that is not how you will get your novel finished.   It is not how you will be a writer.

So you are inside where it is cool and the fridge is making a thunking noise.  And there is your keyboard and your hands.   Your hands are urging you to click over to Facebook because someone may be saying something interesting somewhere in your friend kingdom, which extends now all over the world.   Surely if you just CHECK it, you can then come back to what you are working on, which at the moment is actually nothing.

And from outside, there is music and a kid cries.   Is it your kid?  You have to go see, you're practically obligated to socialize while you are out there and oh, how the days all start smudging together and all the while, there is your laptop, missing your hands and your book becoming ever-more unfinished.

Are you a writer or are you someone who has an idea that being a writer might be something you want to do?

It's OK, either way.  No one HAS to be a writer.  It is no more or less glamorous than any other job.  No more or less important.  I'm not saying you should or shouldn't do it.

Should you?

I assume that because you asked the question, you have an idea that it is what you want.

Decide.   

Writing is a decision.

If it is what you choose, it won't always be easy.  Sometimes when you are writing down the thoughts and feelings of your characters, some new louder kids will come to the playground and demand that it is their turn.   

This is the hard part.   There are sometimes louder voices.   So there you are, doing your job, claiming your first batch of characters, but what to do with the second batch?

It is not their turn.

They can wait in line.   And they will.   You just have to make the decision to tell them to wait.

This is all in you.  No one else will do it for you.

Commit.   Commit to the first group of characters.  The second, third, fourth group of voices are not going anywhere.  They will just hang about, waiting to be claimed.   

They can wait a long time.

And then you write it out, your characters' story, word by (sometimes laborious) word. 

Be prepared to delete it if it's terrible.

Be prepared to walk away.

Here is how you finish your book:

Sit down.   Type some words.   Read them.  Delete them as required.  

Delete with reckless abandon.

Never, ever, ever think of deleting something as a loss.  It isn't. Deleting ten words can add more to a sentence than just adding more and more.

Add and delete generously.

Do this a lot, but do not do this all the time.   Sometimes you need to go outside, see friends, go shoot some pool, watch a movie, walk, hold hands with someone, read a poem, listen to something.  You need to have a life.   There are blue adirondack chairs to sit in.   

If you begin to write at the expense of everything else, that won't work either.   

Find a balance. 

Here is some other advice:

Don't count your words.   Don't measure your success by other people's standards.  

Stop comparing.  

Tattoo that on your wrist if necessary.  If you have ever compared yourself to another writer, stop.  If you ever feel like you've failed when you count words, don't.  You have to simply make a conscious decision to STOP.

You are successful when your characters have finished saying what they want to say. 

You are a writer when -- each time you empty the playground -- it fills up again on its own accord.

You have done your job when you've heard them.   All of them.

No one will think you are crazy for referring to your characters this way and if they do, they just don't know what it is like to be the one inside, while chalk drawings unfold on sidewalks and summer starts to unfurl like a new leaf held just out of your reach at the end of a branch on the neighbour's back lawn.

People WILL think you are crazy.   (Probably.)  

Who cares?

The most important rule is this:

Stop worrying what other people think.

It really doesn't matter.

If you don't believe enough in your writing to stop worrying about those people, you are doomed.  You have to believe your characters when they say they have a story to tell.  If you can't because it sounds, well, crazy, then you probably should not be a writer.  

I'm just saying that because it is true:  If it isn't important to you, you aren't going to finish your novel.   Or your poem.   Or your song.  

Ever.

Face it.

It's hard, prying these words out one by one, inch by inch, day by day.

So it has to matter.   

Now go write something.   Don't make the act of writing something so hard and so other.   It is not mystery and witchcraft.   It is the simplest and hardest thing in the world to just sit down and begin to type.   It is hard to stop and listen.   It is harder still to believe.

Believe.

Do that, and you will be just fine.

I promise.

Sometimes when I give talks or lectures, I talk about how much I love my job.  And it's true that I do.  I think that making up stories and getting paid to do it is almost unbelievably lucky.  But I also feel like I'm lying when I say again and again, I love it.  

I don't always.   Sometimes it is just flat-out hard.  

Some days, it is ugly.   

But some days, it's beautiful.

So if you're thinking of writing as a job, remember:   It's ugly beautiful, beautifully ugly.   And if what you are writing gets too ugly, you can always delete it.  The white screen will always be beautiful with potential.   Trust me. 

Let me know how it goes.

This beach gives gifts. 

Every time we go there, it offers up one perfect white shell.   A whelk, I think.   One shell.  Every time.  I keep them in a vase on the windowsill.  

Today I took the kids there.  And today we found hundreds of shells.  Everywhere we stepped, there were more and more.  For reasons I couldn't explain, I felt like crying.  

Then The Bun reached down and said, "Can I keep this?" 

It was a perfect, dried blood star.   I'd never even seen one before.   A perfect gift among hundreds of perfect gifts.

We came home and unloaded our pockets into shiny silver mixing bowls of soap and water, the shells whitening more over night.  In the morning, we'll fill more and more and more glass vases and keep them on the windowsill -- the windowsill of whatever house we happen to inhabit -- with the others, collected more slowly, one at a time.  Our history.

I have not been here because I've been readying the house.   The house is for sale.   The house I thought I'd do anything to hold on to.   It turns out, it is just a house.  

A huge wooden sign with my cousin's name on it is on the front lawn, swinging in the strong winds that blow up from the beach.   I am sad and not sad.  

I have made arrangements to buy another house, nestled at the foot of the mountain I love.  (The one where I logged so many miles after my marriage collapsed like a stringless puppet, limp in a heap on the stage, the audience silent.)

Our own place.  Mine and the kids.  Tiny and perfect.  Shadowed by hundred year old trees, standing behind it like sentries, guarding us from all that could go wrong.

Today when we walked, I passed two houses where I lived for several years each.   Each house was a different chapter.  I have one distinct memory from each home.

Neither memories are good ones.  

I wonder what this says about me.

I've been reading a lot of poetry.  Poetry fits me right now -- small snippets of beautiful language carved into sculptures that I can carry in my pockets and worry my fingers around while I repaint trim and dig in the yard.  Poetry makes me pause and breathe more deeply and to remember something basic about being human.  That sounds corny and ridiculous, but it's not.  It's just true.  

When you read Mary Oliver, it's like going outside.  It's like being barefoot on a dirt path, dawn sprinkling the blades of grass that line the way with dew.  It's like the sky is wrapped all around you, holding you.  

It's like that.  

Do you know what I mean?

Dogfish 

- Mary Oliver

Some kind of relaxed and beautiful thing
kept flickering in with the tide
and looking around.
Black as a fisherman's boot,
with a white belly.

If you asked for a picture I would have to draw a smile
under the perfectly round eyes and above the chin,
which was rough
as a thousand sharpened nails.

And you know
what a smile means,
don't you?

*

I wanted the past to go away, I wanted
to leave it, like another country; I wanted
my life to close, and open
like a hinge, like a wing, like the part of the song
where it falls
down over the rocks: an explosion, a discovery;
I wanted
to hurry into the work of my life; I wanted to know,

whoever I was, I was

alive
for a little while.

*

It was evening, and no longer summer.
Three small fish, I don't know what they were,
huddled in the highest ripples
as it came swimming in again, effortless, the whole body
one gesture, one black sleeve
that could fit easily around
the bodies of three small fish.

*

Also I wanted
to be able to love. And we all know
how that one goes,
don't we?

Slowly

*

the dogfish tore open the soft basins of water.

*

You don't want to hear the story
of my life, and anyway
I don't want to tell it, I want to listen

to the enormous waterfalls of the sun.

And anyway it's the same old story - - -
a few people just trying,
one way or another,
to survive.

Mostly, I want to be kind.
And nobody, of course, is kind,
or mean,
for a simple reason.

And nobody gets out of it, having to
swim through the fires to stay in
this world.

*

And look! look! look! I think those little fish
better wake up and dash themselves away
from the hopeless future that is
bulging toward them.

*

And probably,
if they don't waste time
looking for an easier world,

they can do it.

I am here for the daffodils.

I'm pretty sure it's for the daffodils, anyway.   I've thought it over, and that's my answer.

Let me explain.

The other day, I was walking with the kids up a winter-ravaged, muddy trail.  It was a grey day.  Everything was dun-coloured.

And then.

THEN.

There along a fence in small yellow technicolour clusters were daffodils, blooming.   The Birdy actually fell to her knees and gasped.   She said, "Look, Mummy.   SPRING!"   

Which reminded me of when my grandmother died and as she lay in her hospital bed, tearing at her feeding tube, she kept murmuring lines from Wordsworth:  When all at once, I saw a crowd, a host of golden daffodils.   Her brain had cobwebs, she explained.  She kept wiping her hand in front of her face to get them away.   She wanted to see the daffodils.  I remember so clearly the smell of her hospital room, and reading out loud to her from the printed sheet:  I wandered lonely as a cloud.  And her face when she half-smiled, her head sinking back into the pillows.

Unrelated:  I got a fortune once that said, "When Spring comes, so will great joy in your life."  I kept it.  I don't know why I kept that fortune and not a million others that I could have found meaning in.   And now, when I see the daffodils, I think of that. 

Joy.  And all joy's possibilities.  

Isn't it those possibilities that keep us moving forward?  

I'm here for the daffodils.

I think.

Of course, the idea that there is a reason for our presence -- for our lives -- presupposes that there is someone or something up there who has a plan.   A lot of people like the idea of a plan.  A reason.   But take away the belief that there is someone or something, and then what?

If there is no "why", does anything really matter?

Yes.

What matters?

Love.

I had this Raymond Carver quote on my wall for a long time.  (The quote is still there, but now the room is empty.   Find the metaphor.)

So.

To love and be loved.  

Is that the point?

We spend all this time seeking it, hoping it, feeling it, wanting it, losing it.   

I think that love, some kind of love, lies behind all the possibilities, greater purpose or not.  

Is that cheesy?

I think it's true.

To feel ourselves beloved on this earth.

Imagine.

We are so lucky.   SO lucky.   We live in a place where our problems are so middle-class that it would be funny if we didn't take it so seriously.   We aren't struggling to survive or being shot at or dying.   We can sit back on our leather couches and look out our double-pane windows at the falling rain, we can be eating whatever we want while we do this, sipping designer tea, and we can luxuriate in this thought:  So what is the point?  

Then we can turn on our big screen TVs and anaesthetize ourself against the rush of fear we feel when we realize there is a possibility that there simply isn't one.  

And what if there isn't?

Or maybe, just maybe, the pointlessness is the point.  

Draw it in circles on paper:  an endless line, tracing a path back to the beginning of itself. 

In the meantime, it is almost spring.

A few years ago, I found a quote in a magazine and I stuck it on the fridge.  It was about marriage and it was from a movie that starred Susan Sarandon and Richard Gere.   The movie was terrible but the quote was good.   I don't still have it because my ex, during a fight, took it off the fridge and tore it up.   He was angry, he explained.

(The paper was so tiny, an inch square.   I imagine him furiously shredding it and I think, That -- right there, THAT is marriage.) 

The quote said:

”We need a witness to our lives.  There's a billion people on the planet, what does any one life really mean? But in a marriage, you're promising to care about everything.  The good things, the bad things, the terrible things, the mundane things, all of it, all of the time, every day.  You're saying 'Your life will not go unnoticed because I will notice it.  Your life will not go unwitnessed because I will be your witness'."

(I am only slightly embarrassed to be quoting from "Shall We Dance" in order to answer your question, Stork.)

I think my answer, similarly, is that I think we are here to witness.   I think that is the why.   I think that is the point.

We witness spring.  Love.  Life.  Death.  Hope.  Fear.  Skinned knees.   Broken hearts.  Suffering.  The next first kiss.  We witness our grandmothers dying in hospital beds.   We witness choices.  Music.   We witness the way the rain trickles down the window panes after being blown there by the wind.  We see art in shadows.  We look closely at the dirt and witness the first green leaves of the daffodils pushing past the composting leaves and the thin layer of frost.

We are the witnesses, and we have a job to do.

We write down what we see, so other people can see it, too.

I've heard other people say that they were put on this planet to write, that is their purpose and they know it.  It is their why.   And I want to adopt that and feel it and believe it, but I'm not so sure.   Is that the point or is it just one of many points?

Is it enough?

I love to write.  I feel most myself when I'm writing.   Or when I'm behind a microphone, talking.  

Is that my "why"?   Am I (just) here to write?

Or is my why about my children?  Am I (just) here to raise my kids up to be good people so they can raise their kids up to be good people and then, with all of us doing that, maybe we can all be good people?

Did someone put me here for that?

Or is that a cop out?   The kids will grow up.  They will likely be good people.  

I may run out of things to write.

Or say.

Then will I cease to have a why?

No.

There will still be daffodils, every spring.  There will still be love.   And joy.

That's why, Stork.

Sand, you say. 

No, he says.  The bottom of the real sea.  The deep sea.  

I don't know, you say.  Rocks.   Weird looking fish.  With lights in their mouths.   They are designed to not be crushed by the weight of water.

Designed by who?  he says.

Um, you say.   

The light glints off the water.   The questions are getting harder.  You don't have the answers.  

Evolution, you say.  

Did we evolution?  he says.

Yes, you say.  But not the same way.

So we can't go to the bottom?

You shake your head.  Crushed, you explain.  Water is so heavy.

You show him with a toy at the beach.  Your experiment doesn't work.  You prove nothing except that there is no reason to not go to the bottom of the sea.  You wonder if more competent parents could more accurately demonstrate the weight of water using only a smurf, some Lego, and the coldish-murky shoreline.   You try not to think about sewage run-off.  The smurf turns an unappealing shade of slime grey.

You need special stuff, you say.  Non-crushable stuff.  It's like going into space, but ... different.  

Great!  he says.  A suit!  Can I have one for my birthday?

You squint into the sun.  Maybe, you say.  Probably not.

He can accept that.  He nods.   Pauses.   The water laps against the shore.   

Can we go into space?  he says.   If I ask for a space suit instead?

You sigh.  No, you say.  Maybe when you're a grown up.

What's the highest anyone has jumped from?  Into the sea?  Could you jump from the moon?

You explain about surface tension.   You show him on a bubble, the tension on the surface makes water like concrete, you tell him.   You feel smart and in control.   There.  Surface tension, explained.  (You are competent, after all!  Science-y!  You have the answers!)

You see him thinking about it.  The concreteness of water.  Its unforgiving surface, and the way that, if you get under it too far, it will crush you.   

Huh, he says.   If I was on the moon, I'd jump into the sea.  

You think about explaining about re-entering the atmosphere and then you get tired.

Sounds good, you say.

You think maybe you should stop talking before he becomes afraid, so you splash him.  He splashes back and then he goes in in his clothes, which you never really mind, because there he is, waist-deep in a winter sea, laughing and free.   You can't go into the water, waist-deep, in the winter because you are a grown up.  You are not free.  You are meant to shake your head and scold him, but you laugh and take pictures and everyone is wet, which is fine, because there is a bathtub at home and hot water and bubbles and things to be teach his little sister about surface tension. 

Everyone lives.

A few times in the last week, you've had moments of happiness.   There is the sun, which helps, and the dense blueness of the air.   Fat bumblebees and blossoming trees, which all feel like a saving of sorts.   A rescue sent to reassure you that yes, things are beautiful and the air is not water, heavy and crushing and you are breathing.   Still.   Better.

In and out.  Out and in.   Here is spring again, and you are in it, whole and alive.

And you are happy in an uncomplicated way, there in the park, The Birdy running up and down the paths, shouting, OK, now I'm going to turn this tree into pink!  With sparkles!  And a rainbow!  Would you like that?

Yes, you say.

Oh, she says.  But you can't see it, she says.  Only I have the magic.  But you have to say, "Wow, I would think that was beautiful if I could see it."

I would think that was beautiful if I could see it, you say.  

She nods approvingly.

I am turning the path yellow!  she says.  It is yellow now!   SAY IT.   SAY YOU WISH YOU COULD SEE IT.

I wish I could see it, you say.

Now everything is a rainbow!  she says.  

I wish I could see it, you say obediently.  

She nods.  Yes, mummy, she says.  Right.  You WISH.

A bad guy, she adds, has turned this tree red with orange stripes.   I will turn it sparkly!  And what will you say?

I wish I could see it, you say.

She takes your face in her hands and studies your eyes.   I am turning your eyes sparkly, she says.  You can feel her cookie-sweet, sleep-stale breath on your nose.  Your eyes sparkle.  She waves her wand in your face and makes a sound like whoosh whoosh.   It's OK, she says, NOW you can see it.

Oh!  you say.  It IS beautiful, Birdy.  It is.

I have made a rainbow in the sky, she says.  It's round, like the moon.

I can see it, you say.

Yes! she says.  You can.  It is the most beautiful thing ever!  

She runs down the path.  I AM MAKING A HUNDRED MORE! she yells.

You laugh.  

She laughs.

And there you are, laughing and weightless, surrounded by rainbows that are shaped like the moon.  

What would you say?

Would you lie?

The truth is that I don't forgive myself.

Do you?

Have you?

Ever? 

Here is a writing exercise.   Find a piece of paper.   It doesn't have to be blank.   It can be the back of an envelope, preferably an opened bill that you can't currently afford to pay.   Say this bill represents things that you've bought in your past that you no longer remember buying.   Say this bill is for things you've consumed and forgotten.  Say that you need the money now, to hold on the house, but it is already gone.  You spent it on things that didn't matter.  Say this bill, and the fact of it, is one of the things for which you probably should forgive yourself.  It's an easy one.   It is just a bill.

And, after all, you didn't know then that you would be trying to hang on now.

You couldn't know.

Find a pen.

Write the following sentence on the white space on the back of the envelope:  I forgive myself.   Feel the pen pressing into the layers of folded paper.   

Doodle around the words.

Draw a bird.  The bird looks terrible so make the bird into an elaborate scroll.   The scroll looks stupid.  Frame the words with this stupid, ugly scroll.   Scribble over the scroll.   Look at the words.   Scribble on them.  Feel the way the pen feels too sharp for the paper and rips through in a few places.   Cringe because of the sound it makes.  Stop.

Trace over the half-obscured words with your finger, so you can feel the way the pen bit into the paper but really left no mark on you.   Look at your blue fingertip.   Make a fingerprint.

OK.   

So that didn't work.

Throw the bill away.   Looking at that envelope will only remind you of what a jerk you really are, doing lame self-help exercises in lieu of, say, paying the bill.

Try again.

This time, go to a mirror.  Stand in front of it.  Do not be distracted by the colour and texture of the skin on your winter-red cheeks.  Talk to yourself as though you are someone you don't know.   Try not to feel crazy.   Do not moisturize.  Not right now.

Say the following words out loud:

"I forgive you."

Point to yourself.   Do not laugh.  Do not under any circumstances begin fixing your hair, out of habit.  

Repeat the phrase, "I forgive you" until it begins to sound like gibberish and you become worried the neighbours can hear you from the walkway and are preparing to call some sort of authorities to report the obvious loss of your mind.

Sigh.

Go ahead and wash your face.   This isn't going to work.

Make a list of all the things you've forgiven yourself for in the past.   Do it on the computer.   (The pen idea was bad because it was too distracting.   There was doodling and the fact of the bill itself, which isn't even one of the things on your looming list of things for which you ought to forgive yourself.)   

Try remembering awful things that you've said and done.

List the people you have hurt.

Then remember what made you forgive yourself.

Realize that you never have.  Not even once.   Not even for things that no one remembers, or even cared about in the first place.

Realize that you are awful to yourself.

Hate yourself for it.

Add "hating myself" to the list of things for which you must forgive yourself right now before you lose yourself in this unforgiving morass of self-loathing.

Realize that saying "I forgive myself" is exactly the gibberish that it sounds like.   Saying it does nothing to loosen the tight bolts of unforgivingness that keep you together.   You are not a forgiving person.  You have never forgiven anyone.  In some ways, your inability to forgive yourself or anyone else feels like the glue that is holding you together.

The list of people you do not forgive begins with the boy across the road who once threw pinecones at you so hard and so relentlessly that he made your ear bleed and then laughed about it.  His name was Ben.   Ben was the first person who you did not forgive.

You did not forgive Sean, who on the first day of school picked you up and shotputted you across the playground, knocking the wind out of you and leaving you dazed for a day.

You did not forgive your best friend in seventh grade for deciding, on the eve of 8th grade, that you were no longer good enough or cool enough to keep her company.

The list of boys you do not forgive is long.  The ones who embarrassed you, the ones who liked you, and the ones who didn't.

You do not forgive the men, either, the ones you loved who let you down.

Especially the last one.

You definitely do not forgive the girl with the moon-shaped face, her eyes greedy for all that you had, which is now hers.

You do not forgive yourself either.   It's in you, in the veins and sinews and tissues of you, this list of the ways you've been wronged and the names of the wrong-doers.   There is a catalogue of what happened and who said what.   There, among your ivory bones, is all the detritus of the ways you've been wronged and have wronged others.

Lately, your chest has been hurting.  You imagine that all these unforgiven wrongs have been pushed to the center of you, your beating heart, and there they are, blocking everything.   Your blood trying to get past it, pounding loudly in your ears.   The pain pulling like a Charley horse.

You must get this unforgiveness out of your heart.

Writing it on an envelope is not going to help.

You must do this thing.  There is going to be no event that triggers this change, there is only you, with your pile of bills and blank screen and awkward complexion, holding on to all these things as though they still matter more than the things that should.  That do.

It gets confusing at this point.

Because it isn't a narrative, it isn't clear.  

There is no defining moment.  

There is just this moment, amongst all the other moments.  It is the same and it is different.

It is the moment when, instead of writing it down, or talking to your reflection, you allow yourself to let go.  No, that's wrong.  That makes it seem like the things themselves want to be released, but you are holding them back.   They are stuck to you with barnacle-like tenacity.   It's not that you have to let them go.  It's that you have to make them leave, pry them off one by one.

Not of all of them.   Just one thing at a time.   All at once is too much to ask of yourself.  Remember?  The point of this is to be kind.   To yourself.  

Gently pry off one barnacle. Take a time when you said or did something stupid, years ago, for which you have yet to forgive yourself.   Remove it willfully.   Cry.   It's so stupid to cry about this one small thing, but there it is.

Now pick something bigger.   Someone recent.

Force yourself to forgive it.

Saying it out loud doesn't have any meaning.   You must feel it.  You must breathe as though it is gone, dislodged from where you were storing it, a greying-white tenacious fist-sized barnacle blocking the flow near the large vessel of your heart.

Now.

Is it gone?

Good.

Cry.

When your friend posed the question about forgiveness, he wondered out loud if love was the thing.  If being loved by someone else could be the trigger to forgiving yourself.  

You said, "No."

Now you aren't so sure.

Love is kindness.  Sometimes kindness must creep in and loosen the bolts and glue of this unforgivingness.  Maybe it is one of the ingredients that can make the barnacles release their grip on you.

You want to email him now and say, "Maybe."

At the time, you thought maybe it needed to be something MORE.   A near-death experience.  A huge life event.  Now you aren't so sure.

In the moment of death, do you really forgive yourself?  Or do you simply realize -- too late -- that none of it actually mattered as much as you tried to make it matter?   

Whereas love, a love that you actually accept?  Maybe there is more power in that, after all.  Because isn't the very act of accepting love the same as the act of forgiving yourself?  Because to accept love, you must feel worthy of love.  

And to feel worthy, you must also have done the work of forgiving the unforgiveable.  

(It is work.  Make no mistake.)

Then, and only then, your heart will be ready:  smooth and unbarnacled, showing only faint marks of the scars where the barnacles once clung.  The blood will then be moving painlessly, allowing love to move gently in to the flow of its unhampered beat. 

You yearn for "new".  

Next year will be a year to begin again, start fresh.  There are two new books to write, already half-formed, waiting.  There will be new ideas to love and new places to go, if only in your mind.   If only on the page.  (Blank, white pages have always been your favourites.) 

There will be new people.   Maybe.  

What you look forward to having is simply new hope.  

Hope, when you say it out loud, does not feel like a thing with feathers, like Emily Dickinson wrote.  Rather, it feels round and mellifluous, something you hold in your hand and worry between your fingers.  Something with weight.   Hope, you revise, is the pebbles your kids pick up from the beach.  You carry them by the pocketful, as they wish.  ("As you wish, m'lady."  It means, "I love you," of course.)  

Hope is a coat weighed down by pebbles.

Some metaphors are easy.

Hopelessness, for example, is a razor sharp ridge that must be traversed in adverse conditions, like say, with a broken heart, or in bad weather.   Or both.

Just an example.   Nothing personal.  

You are not referring to yourself.   To your own life.  

Are you?

Well.

You have been pretending that it is not the case.   You have made out like it hasn't hurt to cross these 365 days.  This winter ridge.   You have not let on how it has been.   You have not told anyone about the way you have been carrying your kids' pebbles in your pockets, held tight in your clenched fists.  

Hope.

You walked all year, one foot in front of the other.  

Sometimes, it was hard.  

Sometimes, it was easy.  (Not really, that's a lie.)

Sometimes, it was impossible.   At those impossible times, you sat down and waited.   Then you decided how to continue.   By letting go.  The more things you let go of, the easier it became to keep going, although letting go of these things was intensely difficult.   You wrote all your hurt on blank white paper, long paragraphs of jealousy and regret.  Then you folded each page with a great precision.  In this way, flocks of origami birds rose behind you as you made your way towards now. 

The pebbles in your hands kept you safe.   They kept you from flying away, too.   The words were caught on gusts and vanished into the blue.   You wrote her name, Melody, this girl who took everything you believed.   And you let go of that, too.

That was the hardest.  

The last step.

Hate is always the last thing to leave.

There were complicated paragraphs involved.  Sheaves of your papery birds swooped down in parks and on rooftops, like a sudden snowfall.   You imagined Melody standing amongst them, confused and blank, not understanding, because she never tried.  How she never seemed to understand any of it will never fail to shock you.   When you think of it too much, the hate comes back, that one paper bird stuck to your heart like glue.   How you were sick.   How she was there when you couldn't be.  How she rolled her eyes and giggled.   How she took.

You write more.  You fold more.  You walk more.  

A novel's worth of words.   More.   

You let them go.   While you let them go, tears slide over the pebbles in your hands.  When they are shiny, they look beautiful.   The metaphor quivers at the edge of your vision, but you can't quite see it.   There is a beauty in being sad that you don't have access to at any other time.   Letting go of the sadness will mean losing that.   Are you ready?

Yes.

Now, you say.  It's enough.  It's done.

And so you come to the end of the jagged ridge and of the hopelessness.  

At the end of this journey, there is a sea. 

Hope is a sea, you think.  

You look out to the sea and you cannot tell what is there beyond the white crests on the surf that foam towards you from the distant horizon.   It's dark.  There are stars behind the clouds.  There is not yet much to see.   But you wait and keep looking.  Eventually your eyes adjust and you see all the pebbles on the beach, glistening in the moonlight when the tar-black waves retreat.  A million pieces of hope, buoying you.   You stand on the shore and drop your pebbles amongst the ones already there.   Under your feet, they are holding you up gently and firmly, like loving hands.  

Hope, you say.  

And the wind finally peels away your last carefully folded origami swan.  It takes it somewhere far away from you, into the infinite stars and the darkest forests and all the places no one has ever seen.   And only then, out of sight of you and everyone else, only then does that swan really fly, wings pushing against air, to climb higher and higher, until it becomes the sky, the feathers the thing that Emily Dickinson understood and that now you finally do, too. 

Hope is the thing with feathers.   And hope is the shine on the pebbles.   And hope is a sea.   And hope is a blank, white page.  

Hope is the reason.   Hope is everything.   

Happy new year everyone.    And may your 2012 be filled with hope.     

Your heart is rickety.  The thing that is missing already in this dream is hope.  The soldiers are killing your children.

NO.

Remain lucid, you say to your hand.  It folds into a shape like a paper crane.

There is a card game on a paddle boat.  The floor is sawdust.   You are wearing a black dress overlaid with a thick lace made from yarn.  Something spilled on the white web of wool, blood or jam.  You wait for your cards.  Now there is a game, but the rules are vague. The numbers slide off the cards like rain down windows.

Your ex-husband is laughing in the distance.  It isn't him. In the dream, he is being played by Christopher Walken.  You are so angry that he's even there, in your dream.  You aren't welcome, you tell him. The women he's with are naked.  You know them.  Christopher Walken shrugs, his laugh boiling out of him like blood roiling in shark-infested water.   

You stand up and you are falling.  A brown bird flies toward your eyes.

You are at a kitchen table.   There are yellow checks on the clean tablecloth.  Something important must be done.

There is a newspaper.   Spiders crawl over it. The horror bothers you. You brush the spiders off. You can't read the paper, the type won't be read. .  

You concentrate on an address where you have to go. Take a train.  The sky outside is a painter's frustrated mistake, smeared with various different weathers.  

You walk across a lawn strewn with frozen leaves towards a forest. The kids are in a sprinkler, laughing.   

You go inside the house. It's huge.  You go up all of the endless stairs.  The carpet lifts and curls and smells like nothing.  The kids would trip if they were there, but they aren't.  Did you forget them somewhere?  Isn't one of them sick?  Trying to remember is like trying to swim through thick, viscous mud.  

Your heart briefly stops in panic.

You can't fill your lungs.   You swim because the house is full of water.

There's a hole in the wall, a gaping maw.   You look at it and think, I shouldn't go there, bad things will happen.  

Where are your wretched hands?  Gone.   

On the top floor, you find -- as you knew you would -- a classroom lined with ancient desks.  The clock on the wall says 3 o'clock.  The grass is ten stories down.  The kids are playing, dressed in white.   

Coming towards you is a little girl in pigtails.  It's six year old you, walking slowly.  You have red eyes, burning like coals.  The horror is profound.  You say, "Let's not."  She sits down.  She is reading a book.   Her hands melt, dripping white wax on the brown desk.  

It's OK, you say gently.   You feel benevolent.

She is the zombie, with her conjoined chickenpox and in her hands a deck of cards.  You shoot her again and again and she stares at you sadly, her eyes are brown.

You try to run, but your legs are wobbly thin, pieces of paper, so you lean down and somehow pull yourself forward with your arms.   

And then you are on the subway platform and you are singing: I am just a poorboy though my story's seldom told, I have squandered my resistance for a pocket full of mumbled sexual promises.

The crowd on the platform moves like water around you.  Most people are wearing blue.  The sky is blue.  You are relieved.  

You wake yourself up with the singing that pushes through the dream and out of you, loudly enough to become a real sound.  All lies and jests still a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest. 

Now that you've woken yourself up, the dream is going fast.  The song remains.  Each remaining piece is evaporating as quickly as a blown bubble pops.  Gone before you can catch them.

Were you dreaming?  he says.  

Yes, you say.  Sorry, did I wake you?

I was already awake,  he says.  You were talking in your sleep.

I was singing, you say. 

You want him to tell you that he heard it, that you truly sang, but he doesn't.  You didn't. 

You remember that your voice resonated and was loud and powerful, rising in the blue. 

I finished a novel last night.  Writing it, not reading it.   Although I've read it, believe me.  

Once, twice, a thousand times.  Four years of work are in those 285 pages.  The words themselves have begun to feel more like a dream than a dream itself.  I have only ever spent this much time on one previous book, my first.   This is my new first book.   My fourteenth first book.  

The novel is as polished as it ever will be, the stones examined and carefully cut with precision tools after being pulled out piece by piece, extracted from the same subconscious that gives me whales that drag me nightly into the dark green glass depths of unknown seas.   

I hope you read it one day, when it exists, bound and glossy on a bookstore shelf, my small story that I lucidly dreamed through my fingers onto this same small screen.  

No one is interested in your dreams or mine.  

A novelist's dreams are likely the most annoying of all, as we are in the habit of looking for meaning in metaphors or making them up in those moments when we are first awakening.  We fill in the blanks and polish the tale.   We add details and explain.  

Dreams should be like failed novels, stored on hard-drives, never to be seen again.  (All those scenes strung together like wetly shining beads, that on closer examination, are only flat dry pebbles, boring in their multitudes.)  

Do you tell people your dreams or do you stop yourself?

The loss.

It isn't the loss, not the way that most people would probably assume.

It's the details, people. 

The old details:

The Christmas party.  His hand on her bare back.   Your eyes meeting her boyfriend's eyes.   Both of you, looking at the hand.   

The way you'd been sitting at dinner, talking about your pending City Hall nuptials.   Your words still hanging in the air, frozen, like a warm exhalation on an ice cold day.   Those same words, now falling in shards of ice all around you, plinking like diamonds on the restaurant floor.

The way the girl giggled.   The way she rolled her eyes.

This new detail:

Now she is in your children's lives.   

"I choose not to suffer," you repeat to yourself, when you think you might be listening.   You think of Buddhism.   You think of leaves floating down a river.   You think of birds, swarming in huge flocks, flowing like water across the sky.  A murmuration.   

You think of the word murmuration, and how it sounds like exactly what it is:  surprising beauty, the soft strength of feathers and the sound of air being pushed downwards by a thousand different wings.

You go to the woods while the kids are with their dad and this girl, and you look very closely at beautiful things.   Trees and leaves.   The way the clouds unfurl.  The footprints of elk in the mud.   "Choose not to suffer," you repeat.   You watch the salmon struggling upstream.   The way the sun filters through the moss growing on a hundred tree trunks.  The way shadows languidly stretch into the undergrowth.

You are choosing not to suffer.  

And yet suffering occurs, against your wishes.

Time heals all wounds, right?  Or at least it fades them to scars:  The dress.   The hand.  The broken words, crunching under your favourite high-heeled shoes.  

And everything that came before that.  And after.

Those scars are old.   Established.   So much a part of you that you no longer notice them first thing when you wake up, or last thing before you sleep.

But now:  the girl's hand holding your children's hands as they walk away into the forest.

Does she ever stop taking, this girl, who wanted wanted wanted and got?  (The boss, power, and more than she bargained for, no doubt.)

This thing that she got, it also comes with your children.  

You choose not to suffer. 

Oh, stop.   Read a book.   Write one.   Do something else.   Knit.   Paint.

But.

You can't.

She giggles and rolls her eyes.  

She giggles and rolls her eyes.

She giggles and rolls her eyes.

She gets high.

Again.

It is this part of divorce that hurts the most:  the sharing of your children with people you with whom you have no desire to share.  With people who are, for lack of a better word, unsuitable. 

It is this part that will tear you inside out.   It is this part that scrapes your insides raw and wakes you up in the middle of the night, heart racing, awash with sweat.

It is also this part of divorce that no one talks about.   Because it isn't supposed to be like this.  It's supposed to be downright pleasant, everyone still "friends", everyone still OK, laughing about the bullets they dodged, making scathing jokes about 'all men'.  It's supposed to be sharing Christmas dinner, everyone with their new partner, framed in a photograph.  Laughing.  Playing a board game.   Having a drink.  Celebrating.  

And the kids moving between them as easily as birds, migrating on a simple path.   Back and forth.   Weekends and Tuesday nights.   

Or maybe that's just how it is on sitcoms, where no one's feelings run any deeper than 1/4 of an inch.

At bedtime, we read a story called ROTTEN ISLAND.   The kids love the line drawings, the monsters with their jaggedy teeth who live on an island where it is boiling all day, and freezing all night; where every wind is a hurricane and the volcanoes shoot poison arrows and lava and two-headed toads; and, where the loathing grows on twisted vines, spiked with thorns and shards of all the broken things.

The monsters thrive on their hate for each other.   Their hatred is what keeps them alive.   They love their hate.

And then somehow, a flower grows.   And the beautiful thing that grows there does not, in fact, make everything better.   It actually makes the monsters hate each other even more, until ultimately, they destroy each other.   And, of course, their demise creates fertilizer for the ground, and more flowers grow.  And eventually the island is awash with flowers, punctuated by the dormant, lush volcanoes, surrounded by the turquoise blue sea.

It looks like St. Lucia.

In there somewhere, there is a metaphor for me, my ex-husband, the girl, and my children.

Find it.   Let me know what you discover.   

Murmuration from Sophie Windsor Clive on Vimeo.

But I don't have one.   Not really.  I could guess, I suppose.   I think it has something to do with how he can't say goodbye.

"Please," he begs.   "I'll give you 50,000 kisses. I'll give you ten dollars."   

So we go.  

It's so cold and I have the flu and barely feel above-ground myself.   Every once in a while, a strange jerking pain in my chest and I think maybe I am not the right person to be, right now, walking around in a graveyard.   The irony, oh, the irony.   Shiver, shiver.  This damn flu.

The Birdy plays hide and seek with herself behind the markers.   She climbs the cross of a baby who died in 1898.  I think about the baby's parents, choosing the marble, and I'm sad.   Parents were still parents in 1898.   The marker reads:  "Innocent".

"Don't PLAY on the dead people," shouts The Bun.  

"Oh", says The Birdy.  She looks down at the grass under her feet.  "It's OK!" she says.  "They aren't here."

"Yes, they are," says The Bun.  

"OK," she shrugs, and starts her game again, further away.   The Birdy isn't afraid of anything, especially not of a few hundred ghosts.   Or her brother.

The Bun has brought a clipboard and some lined paper, which he made especially.  It is my job to write down the names from the graves he selects.   He chooses seriously and carefully and gradually we fill five pages of lines.   My hand is freezing, my fingers are numb.

"Are we done?" I say.  "What is this for, anyway?"

"For remembering," he says, in a voice that suggests that maybe I'm very stupid. 

Which sometimes I am.

"But you didn't even know these people," I say.

"They still need to be remembered," he says, like it's the most obvious thing in the world.   

Some things don't need to be remembered.   Some people.   Yet the ones you'd like most to forget are the ones who stick the most firmly, lodged in your daily consciousness like rats in sticky traps.    The ghosts of living people are the ones who never, ever, ever leave you alone.

They are the scary ones.

The Bun keeps the catalogue of names beside his bed.   

Read it, he says.   So I do.

It's sad and definitely a little strange, but also it isn't.  In a way, it's the most normal thing in the world -- to hold on to what (and who) is lost.  

In that way, it feels a lot like love.