More Mess, Please.

revamp verb they plan to revamp the kitchen
renovate, redecorate, refurbish, recondition, rehabilitate, overhaul, make over; upgrade, refit, re-equip; remodel, refashion, redesign, restyle; informal do up, give something a facelift, rehab.

Ah, facelift. I like it. I'm dusting this old thing off. Trying to put prettier things on top in hopes to make the awful class-enforced blog posts that came before this one quiet down, or just go away.

I just tried to list 6 things about myself and I'm not sure why. Hello, Lindsey. You are the only person reading this and you already know all 6. Want to guess anyway, though? Didn't think so.

I'm not exactly sure what I'm doing here. What I do know is that I am trying to force myself to write again. To write daily, which, in truth, is something I have never done--except maybe for a brief stint freshman year, and it was poetry, awful poetry. (Awful.) I love to write. I love to make up elaborate stories and characters with overly indulgent details, I love to research and observe and look up statistics for essays on tiny moments we often catch merely glimpses of, I love to plop short globs of language, clumsily and abrupt, atop slender swimming lines of poetry. I am in love with it, but it taxes me. I am overwhelmed by what I could write, or what I couldn't, or what would be too painful to pen down. I am anxious, and these days, too fidgety to sit still long enough to let some magic happen.

Last night I sat on our plump leather couch reading Jhumpa, and felt that ache I feel. When the way a line, or a charater's expression, peels the skin right off of me and climbs inside. I ache for the passion a couple feels when they share a first kiss while making dinner, then collapse into each other, and crawl into the bedroom to make love, forgetting the food, simmering (soon burning) in pots and pans strewn across the top of the stove, and the uncorked wine. Let loose. So loose that the fact that the frying pan has to be thrown out afterwards doesn't even matter. It is casually mentioned, a short sentence that follows them slipping back into their clothes, laughing as they order bad Chinese food and split some left-over beer from the back of the fridge. Effortlessly, it is life. It is messy: she has couscous in her hair. It is messy: he smells like onions. It is messy: their sticky bodies draped over one another's on top of a nondescript bedspread, in a nondescriptly messy New York apartment.

I'd like a little more messy, please. I'd like a little more loose. I want to forget about the pots and pan, too. Let the charred dishes sit in the sink and get dirtier. I'd like to stay up too late and eat more bad Chinese. I'd like to make more messes with my writing. I'd like to slosh onto pages instead of tip toe. I'd like to fail miserably at writing a 100-page Sci-Fi novel. I'd like to be proud of pages wrinkled from indifference, and traced in brown watercolor coffee stains that no one will ever read. I'd like to live a little more, write a lot more.

I guess we'll just have to see, won't we?