Longhand
There is something very unsatisfying in knowing this is a short piece. It will take me longer to write and edit it than will last the satisfaction of reading it, or having it published, but still I go on, in these very small hours, dragging the pen across the lined page—whose lines I write on top of, like a balance beam, so incapable am I of writing in a straight line across a page, in the white space essentially, where one is supposed to write and where, if I look at other writers who still write as I do, longhand, in order to get the most out of the brain during the writing experience—I would never write on a computer screen, besides, my eyesight as I meander into middle age is bad enough as it is without looking at a brightly beckoning, mocking screen, which may be more intimidating than a lined page, of which lines, as I said before, are ultimately superfluous--as I was saying, if I looked at another writer’s page, they would likely be neatly within the lines, whereas, as much as I try, as I set out to write, I’ll even suggest to myself, this time I’m going to write above the line, it’s a thing for me. I’ve been writing this way forever now, and if my father sees me writing longhand he asks, “Do you still write at an angle across the page?” This must have been a thing too, when I was younger, and writing on unlined pages. To this day I can’t write on a white sheet of paper without miles of lines on it as faint as the blue in the early morning sky; without it, my writing curves downward to the lower right corner, and is soon arcing like a waterfall across the page. This is what my father was referring to, and when I imagined him seeing me writing like this, I thought I should have been embarrassed, but I wasn’t. Was he? I can’t be embarrassed, there’s just so much that I have yet to write, no matter how it looks on the page as I write it.