Creativity

What’s Friday Freewrite? Find out here.

I have the most curious desire¹ to forsake everything I know, a job, a house, nice things, to travel the world, to write, to see things most people only dream of seeing.

I want to be free, free to write, to see things, to be what I was made to be. I hate being stuck in a 9-6 job, sitting by the window, watching the ocean from the 11th floor, people scurrying about like ants, boats coasting along the water like children’s toys in a bath tub².

I hate not being a part of it. Life is so much more. There’s a whole world out there, and every day, from 9 to 6, I’m missing it.

I want to sail to Africa, backpack through the middle east. I want to get on a rocket that won’t ever stop until it’s touched the furthest star.

Freewriting. Loosening the pen and the mind, when I get stuck and don’t know—³

Blue, rough fibers⁴, streaked in blue and green, a foreign pattern. The woman flopped it about her, swatting away at flies by a dusty old well that hadn’t provided for decades. Ancient symbols festooned the marble band that wound around the rim, their meaning lost along with the water.

The woman looked up at the sky, shielding her eyes from their oldest nemesis, that big flaming ball of fire in the sky that roasted and scorched and killed with indifference.

Footnotes

1. I’ve had this desire for a long time. Maybe someday it will come true…

2. Should be bathtub.

3. If I’m freewriting and I have no idea what to write about, I sometimes write that. You’d be surprised how often I stumble onto a new topic simply by keeping the pen moving, even if the pen doesn’t produce anything interesting for a while.

4. After freewriting on one topic, I abruptly switched to another, this time a random visual that popped into my head while I was complaining that I didn’t know what to write about. I remember where I was when I wrote this. I was sitting down at the Starbucks inside Barnes & Noble in Long Beach. I was hosting a meetup group, and was waiting for the one person who had RSVPed to arrive. It’s amazing how much you can recall when a specific memory is attached to a strong sensory perception, even if it’s one that’s imagined.

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What’s Friday Freewrite? Find out here.

Hey, this would make a great blog if I could tie it to books!¹

We walk around with plastic smiles on our lips, pretending to be happy, void of meaning, empty, our hearts a vacuum without meaning. We search, yearning for Truth, meaning, a place where we belong, and we don’t find it. So we drown ourselves in booze, drugs, entertainment; we get caught up in surface things so we won’t have to feel the deepest longings in our heart and our pain at having them unfulfilled. We try to dull the pain, even though it only masks the symptoms, and doesn’t cure the disease. And so the disease, without us feeling its presence, silently eats away at our souls, until nothing is left.

…²

Footnotes

1. Sadly, this blog has yet to be written…

2. Yeah, that’s it for this week. I wanted to post more, but this was all I had written that day, and it stands too well on its own for me to add more.

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©2014 Jeff Coleman. All rights reserved. For reproduction rights, please contact the author (who happens to be a kind and eminently reasonable man.) Unless otherwise stated, images are copyrighted by various artists and licensed by Shutterstock.