Crickets and Cars and Computer Keys

100th BLOG POST!! YAY! Here is a piece I wrote that pretty much describes me as a thinker and a writer.

 

Writing on a laptop, screen blazing white into the dim living room lit by not one, not two, but three lamps. Legs underneath a faded maroon blanket, warm but not hot. Fingers tapping, scrolling, typing. My brain thinks and tell my hands what to do and they tap the keys that tell the screen what to do. We are one machine, one motion. I think and they write, they write and the computer thinks. I read it, I pause, I look out the window.

The blinds are half drawn and slanted open. The thinning blue sky outlines a large tree, a mere silhouette by this time at 8:31 pm. Cars on the highway roll by, the hum of tires on pavement and the occasional rumble of a motorcycle filling the emptiness in the house. There is the shuffle of book pages as the reader in the red—now faded pink—arm chair finishes a page and then flips it, reading on, not pausing, not thinking, just reading.

Stop. Write. Think. Stop. Read. Look out the window. Write. Stop. Think. It ebbs and flows, a pattern ever shifting. The delicate wings of a cricket floats through the window, blending with the cars on the highway. Buzz, rumble, a heartbeat of quietness. Everything has a pattern, a moment of hesitation. I can feel the rise and fall of the sounds around me as the page flips, the reader reads, the cricket sings, the cars go by. Then a free, soundless, perfect moment of stillness. Then the page flips.

Looking at the screen again, focusing through the glare in my glasses. Fingers are still tapping, mind is still thinking. I am writing but no, I am thinking–and suddenly they become the same, writing and thinking do not differ in anyway except for one is in my mind and the other is on a screen. Is this how thoughts look? Suspended, clinging onto invisible lines on the clean white screen? Are my thoughts scrolling, in Arial font, consistent and stopping, starting, stopping, starting? Or are they lapsing and rolling like the waves of an ocean?

Stop. Look out the window. The sky is darkening rapidly. A song is stuck in my head. I look back at the screen, thoughts and words a jumble on the Google Doc in front of me. The document is still untitled. I’m untitled. This moment is untitled, and will remain so, because there is no name for a brief moment in time while crickets and cars and computer keys work. Unless a slightly over-tired, slightly too philosophical person  comes along and names it. But that’s just what happens on Saturday nights. Writing on a laptop, screen blazing.