You know that feeling. The one where you get a sort of miniature electric shock somewhere deep in the back of your mind. It’s sort of blurry and very much misshapen, mostly because it was conceived out of nowhere but really mostly that it came into the world kicking and screaming without giving you a single notice of approval in advance. But here it is, and you are drawn to it like a relentless homing pigeon. What a shiny new thing to carry around with me as I flit about your head, said the pigeon who listens to the hackneyed judge who also lives in your head, it’s no good feeding into it, these stupid, irrational, unsustainable ideas. Condemn them all! Every last one of them! And you listen, and you nod, but you don’t, can’t really, so you petal bits of food around its vicinity. In the end, no matter how impossible it all seems, you still wish for it to grow up, to become as real any other thought that you have cultivated from the very beginning.
On and on this goes and despite good, sane, and rational intentions, you cannot for the- love of God – stop. thinking.
stop. just stop.
and for once, it stops.
Listen. What remains is glorious, transcendental silence, and you feel a bit sad because you might have lost the most fantastic one yet.
Then off in the distance you see, as inconsequential as the first, a second twinkle.
and further off, a flutter of wings.
ink and toast 