Thursday, July 25, 2013

Right around game six of the first set today, just after a particularly sweet serve, I thought I was going to die. My heart began pounding rapidly, to the point where it felt like it was close to bursting out of my chest, and like a fool, I played straight through the pain in a misappropriated show of endurance. I remember racing through a handful of thoughts, chief among them disappointment over how I wouldn’t be able to write tonight.

I’m kidding! Absolutely kidding. Blogging wasn’t one of the things that crossed my mind, nor was anything related to the Internet, frankly, and for that I’m thankful. In retrospect, I think I had all my priorities in order, not that I was exactly looking for a dry run deathbed experience this week. Then again, you wouldn’t really ever look for something like that, I suppose.

But I didn’t want to completely dismiss the topic of writing because I’ve been doing a lot of it recently, both in and out of the office, and it’s been a smooth run. We’ve discussed a few of my rituals before, but I wanted to add a third to the mix. It’s by no means new. It’s simply the mandate to produce something that can elicit emotion, and it’s actually drawn from a quote in an article, almost a decade old, about a seamstress who was trying to improve her English. She spoke about “those big round words that explain better what goes on in your mind…those proper words that come from the deeps of a person, and that burn a little when they’re spoken.” Words that burn, indeed.