Tinny Words in Cups and Saucers

At three thirty this morning the iPhone beeped. Generally I throw a pillow over it and go back to sleep but this morning I picked it up and it blinked at me and quivered just a bit as if needing a petting like the cat. On the screen, amidst calls for Trump’s head and Wanna Get Away offers from the airlines, were three emails from you which were mostly responses to questions or issues that I’d raised.  But it was dark and I wasn’t about to leave the warmth of bed to find my computer.  Instead I lay back on the pillow and began composing my responses.  Overhead, sentences and words spun until they fell back onto the pillowcase  and I put them into cups and saucers on the side of the bed and dashed off to other thoughts.  Soon I was driving in the nighttime rain down a back alley in Paris, wondering if I’d find my way home.

I awoke in my diving bell.  The sentences I’d carefully composed seemed tinny and rehearsed in the morning light but I typed them anyway and then I thought: I’m writing this to myself. There is no you. Just me spinning off comets and asteroids to visit at twilight, speechless.  Tethered to what, I don’t know. Hopefully a boat on the surface. 

Then I thought of all the other people who swam past my visor as wisps and puffs who blogged and tweeted and posted pictures online and they all became phosphorescent angelfish to follow as the tides pushed me through another rudderless day of writing only to myself.