Pages Of Imperfection

Wrote this a while ago for a class, it kind of explains my writing process. 




         Her head jerks up, a shimmer of a bubbling thought is growing inside her mind. Hurriedly she rushes through the remainder of the task at hand and races up the stairs to her room. By now the thought is growing steadily, gaining momentum. she flops down on her bed, adjusts the pillows just so. 
          She brushes back the hair from her face, tying it back out of her eyes, digs through the nightstand cubby looking for the polka dotted case containing her reading glasses.They somehow make her feel like she knows what she is doing, they give her a sense of clarity, and not just because the page is in sharper focus. Perhaps it is because they make her seem older, and as though she is wiser, wiser than she truly is. There is, along with this sense of maturity a sense of urgency in her actions, as if there were a deadline looming though none exists. It is the frantic scramble of someone who has something on the inside that needs to get out. The shimmering idea, now fully grown bounces around in her head, fighting for all of her attention. It cries out to her, begging to be set free; to be given life and air and ink.

         Her thoughts sometimes flow into rhymes or poems, or narratives on the lives of others(real or imagined), and perhaps on occasion words to a tune she’s been humming all week. She may express pain over the loss of a loved one, or the excitement felt about the birth of a niece, happiness, and regrets can be found in these pages, as well as feeble attempts to describe the incomprehensible joy of forgiveness of sins. “Yes,” she thinks “there is nothing, good nor bad, that doesn’t seem to be better when laid out in black and white.” So, she settles down between her blue cased pillows, and gives her thoughts wing.
          Quickly she grabs a thin yellow notebook from the top of a stack of identical notebooks that has slowly grown on her shelf over the years. She couldn’t say why yellow exactly, just something about them drew her in, and made her want to write, to fill the empty lined pages with her thoughts. She flips through the filled pages, pages crinkled with the tears of sorrow and loss, past fears of failure, and pages filled with the ecstasy of hope born again. She glances over a sheet that she’s read a thousand times, the story so familiar it could have been real. The thought continues it’s nagging, urging her on till she finds a clean sheet. Gripping her black ball point pen she slowly forms her first careful word. The rush begins, and she scarcely knows what she is doing.

          She writes on, perhaps a dozen lines, or a dozen pages the words slow, and eventually stop. The thought no longer vies for her whole attention, its goading has stopped, and it simply lays there out in the open, vulnerable and unsullied by the reality of the technical aspects of writing. She lies back on the pillows and sighs. This is a sigh of relief and trepidation, for the words now safely out of her mind, are still restrained to the confines of the yellow notebook.
          From within the sticker clad covers each page still calls to her. Leaving her wishing to take them up once more, prune, refine, and, dare she hope perfect them. When she stops and thinks she wonders why she lets them sit in this unfinished state, freed from her cluttered mind, yet disorganized all the same. When she does find the time she views, with the harshest critics eye her fledgling ventures into the literary realm. Months, even years old works are re-worded, re-written, re-written again. Fingers hurting, and daylight long gone she glances at her clock and closes the notebook. She flicks off her light, and settles in with dreams of a day when she can truly feel that it is completed.