Lately, I have missed words and lost them at the tip of my tongue. It is an unfortunate ailment if you call yourself a writer. Were I to paint a picture for you with my words, it would appear that when I sit to write, I often find myself lost in my mind. It is a stroll through the woods I know like the back of my hand, only this time they are filled with dense fog, and blinded as I am by it, I fall into a creek and lose all semblance of who I am.
Perhaps this is an exaggeration, but it indeed feels like I am losing a part of myself when I struggle to find the word “prolific”. It took me about twenty minutes to find it when I last went looking. This is new to me, and perhaps I am mulling too much over it, but it worries me. Haziness of my mind aside, I need to press on still, but the days—which often feel like a deck of playing cards filled with duplicates of the most inane cards like a three of clubs or a seven of spades—are not helping me much in their duplicity. It was just yesterday that I realised I had not an ounce of knowledge about what day or date it was, not that it would have made a difference, but there is knowing something unnecessary and not knowing something at all, regardless of its value. I would much rather live a trivial life filled with the former than the latter.
Perhaps this would be nothing, just torpor. For now, however, it is a pain in the ass, a thorn in my side, an albatross around my neck, a monkey on my back. If my predicament seems tiny, let me draw you a comparison. What would a boxer be if they forgot, all of a sudden, the difference between a hook and an uppercut? Would a driver ever forget the order of their pedals? Would a musician ever forget their chords? Would they sit in the middle of a performance thinking which is F and which G? There is no conclusion until it arrives. But it has become a problem. It would only increase from here unless I intervene. Well, here is my intervention! I have written about it, made it real.
Just today, I wanted to say something, but that was three hours ago, and I have yet to find the word. “What is the word for it?” What a disturbingly ironic catchphrase for a writer, I reckon.