dive in like honeybees

I have so much to say, and it feels like so little time left to say it.

Maybe I never mentioned that I could never stop writing, not even for a brief hiatus, when I turned my back on the suggestion of being an English major and fell into the challenge of learning about something new. I know what you're thinking, that I could have sunk so deeply into literature, poetry courses, an interdisciplinary creative writing honors program, and come through these long four years with a portfolio worth showing.

I wonder if that would have been a better use of my time, as I tap my fingers on the dirty table and wonder how I am supposed to write a historical thesis abstract in the the next twenty-three days.

It's been more than four months since I've sat down to write an academic paper, the notes and sources and reference books arranged around my cross-legged form in a perfect semi-circle, coffee cups perched on the table and ignored, a pen twisted in my hair to keep it out of the way as I frown in concentration, my fingers flying to keep up with the corseted, gasping, tightly-laced flow of facts and images. I haven't recently had the pleasure and the tension of a deadline ticking down, the exquisitely formatted margins bottlenecking my text, three tabs on citation formats open in the background.

When I write papers, I write them straight through, churning out a page every fifteen minutes with footnotes included, racing through a detailed outline, until finally I reach the end. Then I sit back, reread, edit, scowl and change things, delete and add, move paragraphs around, polish the piece.

That love/hate relationship with the tightly bound freedom of writing papers is, at the end of the day, why I want to write a thesis so badly. Maybe sometimes I have been forgetting that desire.

Reading: my notebook
Listening to: What Sarah Said // Death Cab for Cutie