I have one page left in my journal, and this constitutes a sort of personal emergency for me. I picture myself waking up tomorrow morning with hundreds of words springing up from my soul with nowhere to go, spilling out into my Notes app, awkwardly taking up space in my Drafts folder, squeezed in underneath grocery lists and budget calculations, or simply forgotten, deemed unworthy of recording.
This is, of course, unlikely. I’ve been keeping a diary off and on since I was 5, sometimes going a year or two between entries. The average entry is a page, maybe two. Couple these stats with the fact that I haven’t really had much to say for the last several days/weeks/months, and my single blank page may seem perfectly adequate to you. But odds are hardly ever any consolation, and I feel that I must be prepared for the best.
I don’t know if one can be said to be experiencing writer’s block when they have no deadline, assignment, book deal, arbitrary personal goal, or any outside expectations whatsoever, when all they have is a burning desire to express themselves, to have something to express, to have a thought that feels new, to play with language rather than use it, to achieve coherence.
Anyway, that’s what I have.
Last night, I went to the local Dollar General to look for a suitable successor to the journal I’ve been nursing for the last two years. (Where I am, that is the most reliable source of such necessary items.) I had my pick of wide-ruled, spiral-bound numbers with flirty covers that exclaimed, “You Are Beautiful” and warned, “I’m Busy”, flimsy notebooks that crackled when I brutishly forced them to lie flat, and tiny memo notepads geared towards shrewd Nellysford detectives and journalists.
Here, faced with the prospect of divulging my deepest longings to one of these sub-par, mass-produced, three-dollar confidants, I had to confront my own personal emergency for what it was: a very, very strong preference.
I left the store with nothing, crossing my fingers that the dam would not finally break loose, and also praying that it would, reminding myself that the Letter from Birmingham Jail was begun on the margins of a newspaper, and what could I possibly have to say?