Woke up this morning with Hemingway’s Ten Indians lingering in my head like a friend lingers near the door when they are about to leave your apartment, or how you stand and ask a final question just as someone turns to leave, hoping, I could only imagine, for the conversation to go on for a little bit more. I regretted not bringing my bookshelf along with me since there are at least three compilations with the story in it, and I had to go the route of scouring for it wherever I could find it. Then, I spent the next few minutes reading it with a cup of coffee, remembering all the times I have read it before, and feeling glorious envy over how I could never write a story as simple and yet so impactful, it meets someone when they are eighteen, and sticks with them for a decade as nonchalantly as a piece of gum being lodged in an old pair of sneakers that sits in the attic because it is too old to be worn but too important to be thrown away. I reckon it is somewhat like that, and when the story knocked me out again, I began the day again, correctly this time. I primed myself by looking at all the things I had to do. Then, I got a message from someone who needed help. I reckon that was it: when someone needed help, you could never tell them no, you could never say things like, “There is a lot to do today”, or “I am a little exhausted”, or “Are you sure you could not do it on your own?”. Now, I wonder that you could, and I am no one to speak for everyone, but not me. It is impossible for me to say things like these on most days, and this is what my life made me, for better or worse.
And yet, as I go through this day fulfilling the different roles I must play like all of us must play, I will think about what I would write about when I write a story, and if it will be any good, and that most things are good if they are complete. I reckon that is all I have to do at some point: sit and complete something other than these pieces that say nothing at all, and if, by exception, they say something, it is rarely anything worth saying.