A case of writer's block

I'm not usually one for quotations. [And yes, it's "quotation," not "quote." The latter is a verb; the former is the noun.] They're the province of Page-a-Day calendars, Trapper Keepers, and pink MySpace pages. Occasionally I'll see something clever and pass it along, but I am--by no means--a collector. This however, seems to fit today:

I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear. -Joan Didion

I'm supposed to be writing. Not this, but something else. Something important. I'm being vague, I know, but bare with me. This post is more for me than it is for you.

I'm supposed to be writing, but all I can do is think. It's always most difficult when it matters. The more pressure I place on myself, the harder it becomes. I shut down.

I am, quite simply, afraid.

All I have right now are fragments. Disjointed sentences, which I've scattered about the page so that I don't forget them. I have ideas. I have memories. What I don't have, is a story.

When I can't write, I read. Essays, reviews, articles. I go from link to link. I pick up books I put down half-way through three years ago. I rediscover favorites. I encounter new ones. Twenty minutes ago I fell in love with Joan Didion. "Can I write like this?" I ask myself. I wonder how many times she felt what I'm feeling now.

“…quite simply, I was in love with New York. I do not mean “love” in any colloquial way, I mean that I was in love with the city, the way you love the first person that ever touches you and never love anyone quite that way again. I remember walking across Sixty-second Street one twilight that first spring, or the second spring, they were all alike for a while. I was late to meet someone but I stopped at Lexington Avenue and bought a peach and stood on the corner eating it and knew that I had come out of the West and reached the mirage. I could taste the peach and feel the soft air blowing from a subway grating on my legs and I could smell lilac and garbage and expensive perfume and I knew that it would cost something sooner or later—because I did not belong there, did not come from there—but when you are twenty-two or twenty-three, you figure that later you will have a high emotional balance, and be able to pay whatever it costs. I still believed in possibilities then, still had the sense, so peculiar to New York, that something extraordinary would happen any minute, any day, any
month.”

I want this. I want this more than anything, and for the first time it seems possible. I can touch it. I can taste it. I can bite into it. It's there. It's real. I know it's not my only chance, but I don't want to have to wait for a second (or third) opportunity.

I want it now.