I haven’t written in a long time. It used to be apart of me, when I’d wake up my hand would get to moving and stretching, knowing it was about to go to work. My hands don’t move like that anymore. I felt for so long that I didn’t know enough to write about nothing, but no one and everyone can say that. Maybe it just depends on how settled you are with yourself. For so long I stepped away from everything to get a better look, to focus my eyes as if everything above and below, no matter the distance was out of focus. That was all in my head. I tried to find the world through others, and books, and Hemingway, and Steinbeck. Escape to a better world, even though each world was the same, just a different view - perhaps, similar when juxtaposed. I wanted something besides sitting. I wanted standing. I wanted solitude instead of kids falling over my legs and each other, dirty and loud. I wanted loud, but in a drastically motivating way, and in my own voice. I wanted my rubber soles worn down, with rocks from mountains and blades of grass from valleys embedded in the tread. Now I want here, I want now, I want her, I want peace, I want war, I want scripture, I want booze, I want sonnets, I want brevity, I want energy, I want inertia, I want Steinbeck, I want Hemingway, I want to need, not want.
I heard in the military they trained snipers to never look at their target for too long through there scope because a person could feel when they were being watched and become paranoid. Begin to observe with keen eyes or bolt and the mission would fail. A man can sometimes feel that they are being watched through a scope at all times. Is this unhealthy? Conceited? A sense of religion? It doesn’t matter as long as my hands are full of dirt and calloused. As long as my hands where strong, with veins as thick as garden hoses, pumping blood and working, building, creating, praying. As long as my mind was strong enough before the final blow to curse my hands for laziness if they cramped. This could be it, my mind would relay to the responding fibers in my fingertips by synapses, pushing them to hold her tighter, dig deeper in the ground and know what has been done there, what blood has been spilt there, what bones are deeper still, to rub the softest peach with the backside of the hand and be grateful. All this before the sniper decides no more. That you have learned your lesson. That your hands have never rested.
