The Passionate Writer

I’ve taken to writing in my underwear. It’s damned liberating. This past week, I’ve been doing my writing in one of these.

The IKEA Poang chair is the best thing that has happened to my body in a very long time aside from my bike. Whenever I come up with something really good, I lean back and relax into this chair for 10 seconds, feeling instantly cradled in the arms of nature somehow, it’s that ergonomically perfect. Perfect like nature. So I sit back for 10 seconds, breathe, then bound forward to continue my process.

Anyhow, my new fondness for nakedness while writing has inspired me to write this story.

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I’m sitting in my underwear. In my living room, for crying out loud. Nice big underwear. Feeling gravity’s pull. Everything is nice. Everything is more than nice.

Except my neighbor is yelling something into my wall again. The message to me is, Stop shrieking. No one cares about your sex life.

**

Indeed, it was her love life that was making her shriek. It was her love of writing. She sized up the words on the page with an unceasing appetite. She could go for hours without stopping, no energy decreasing. Sometimes, she even outran herself. She’d be eagerly starting one story when another would spring from some word. A random word would spring from one story and leap off to create its own. She was juggling a lot.

But it had to be it’s own story; there wasn’t enough room to share stories. These are short stories. Someone’s ego would eventually get bruised, or else it’d have to turn itself into a novel, and “There’s no way in hell I’m ever writing a novel,” she’d say to herself.

“My brain is beautifully small. Short stories, personal essays, commentary, travel writing. No slaving over some enormously looming structure, bowing to it as I push aside every creative whim to appease its hunger for stability.”

“So one story sometimes leads to two, sometimes three. I like to think of them as my offspring. Goodness knows, I’ll never find a man in this self-induced solitary confinement. Anyhow, why should I go out searching for ecstasy abroad when it’s right here in my hands?”

“There’s this sentence forming deep inside me. It’s twisting against my pelvis. It’s rising through me. It’s revising, it’s changing; it’s getting there. Because I’m a woman, you think this is all symbolic of the child I long for. But maybe you haven’t heard anything I said before. These words are what I love. I’d never sacrifice this constant hunger and satisfying. This thing inside of me is firing my nerves, expanding my lungs, tingling my mind. It’s traveling the lengths of my body; it’s making me feel like I am enough, and good enough, and it feels so good, and here it is.

The perfect sentence.

I shriek. My neighbor is pissed off again.

Soon, maybe underwear will be too restricting of my creative juices.”