To write your own life...

I woke up at dawn today. I lay there, listening to the hum of the air conditioner. I pulled the covers close around me. The words flowed into my mind. Everything I've been meaning to say, everything I should have said. Entire conversations the way I wanted them to flow. A brief hello that should have been an hour-long tete a tete. A discussion that went awry set right. A smile that turned into a friendship. A fight that melted away. I articulated all of my thoughts. Expressed myself so that what I said wasn't just a jumble of thoughts and feelings, but logically flowing analysis and explication of what my heart and mind were experiencing. An entire summer's worth of conversation, the ones that slipped out of control: carefully held within bounds; the ones that were wonderful: expanded into an everlong stream of exchanges.

This re-writing of my life could only stay in my head. No matter how much time I spent reliving and re-enacting and re-making these interactions, they were what they were. They were in the already-occurred. Always changing with the changing colors of memory, but still, in some way, etched into the stone of the past.

I sighed and pushed the covers aside. The words I had actually meant to say fell off the corners of my bed, useless. The words I wished had never been said curled up in the pillow. The imaginarily extended witty repartee got lost in the creases of my sheets.

With certainty I can say this: the edits never make it into the final product. One chapter, already written, flows into the next.