Saves Nine

Day 12 of National Novel Writing Month.

Time is moving too fast. I woke up last night in a sudden and intense panic with the feeling I was being chased. It was four o'clock in the morning and I grabbed the nearest notebook from the floor and began scrawling hurriedly in the dark -- The List -- all the things I want to have done before I'm too old to do them. There were thirty or forty items before I leaped out of bed and began digging through the bookshelf of notebooks from the past 20 years in search of the last list I made.

I was thinking recently about that old list, and how I had accomplished so many of the things that I remember writing on there even though I haven't read it in years. I knew it was in the burgundy spiral-bound notebook from 1994, with the egotistical and ambitious quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson on the cover ("To be great is to be misunderstood"). I remember sitting in a bar at 18 reading the list impishly to my significantly older boyfriend, who good naturedly replied to several of the line items. I wanted to learn how to use chopsticks. I wanted to drink red wine by candlelight. I wanted to write a screenplay. I wanted to move to New York and live like a starving artist. He assured me, with holes in his jeans and a studio in the ghetto, that living like a starving artist was not as glamorous as it sounds. Four years later I was sitting on the floor of an empty apartment eating leftover Chinese food with those chopsticks. And I couldn't write the screenplay or make rent because of my massive substance abuse problem. (So much for red wine by candlelight.) I called him to tell him he was right about the glamour.

I hope this List doesn't end with me knocking out my teeth ice skating at Rockefeller Center or dying of dehydration during my road trip through New Mexico. Or spraining a wrist while making love continuously through all the Morphine albums.

I used to count months by the seasons. I used to tell time by the semesters. I've been out of college longer than I was in it, and now I have to subtract actual years. 2003 minus 1998. It's all bleeding together and moving way too fast. I recently went to email someone with whom I haven't communicated in what I thought was a year, but when I checked the last email I sent him, I learned it has been two.

It's not that I'm getting old. I'm not having one of those crises. Age has always been irrelevant to me. I just feel like I haven't done enough. My wheels are turning. My feet want to move. Everyone around me tells me I'm moving at the speed of light. Look at all the shit I've done in the past two years. Look at all I've been through in the past six months. I've survived. And I'm still running. But I don't feel like I'm keeping up.

It doesn't help that I'm trying to write a novel in 30 days, right? I will still do this, but I can't figure out if it's working for or against my feeling of being stalked. Last night I had a nightmare about my main character dragging enormous black wings behind him like some fallen angel of death. He was coming to get me.

I better go write.