A Letter to Self
the revelations of a procrastinator
Dear Me:
Well, my friend, it’s a year gone. March 2024.
Tell me, did you accomplish anything that you promised yourself back then? You do remember, don’t you? Of course, you don’t. You’re an old man with no memory of yesterday, let alone one year ago. You can’t even lay down your car keys without some short circuit in your brain, confounding their loss.
You’re seventy-five at the time of this writing. Let’s see, just so you have a reference point, you promised to write that Query Letter to a Publisher.
Okay, where is it?
I’ll bet my pants, buddy, it never got sent. Am I right?
What prevents you? It’s the same old story: the realization that your life is an inch from falling over the edge. Perfect! It’s a good reason to do nothing.
Your life is pretty damn good. You don’t know how or why; everything a man could ask came your way. There’s been the pain. The grief that still lingers. But who hasn’t that symptom in their lives? Then there is the frustration. You still haven’t recognized that your frustration is nothing of the sort; procrastination bedevils you.
We both know — me here, you up there — that pure chance stepped in for you to find this letter. You’ll be browsing the computer, looking for something, a story whose title is forgotten, or searching, perhaps, the address of an old friend or even the photo of a loved one you didn’t think to place in a folder for easy access. New technology, old man, do you see where you’re heading?
How odd that you should recall every day of your career, not the day your grandchildren were born. You don’t need to remind yourself of youth. Trust that you lived it well — without regret, then gone. You don’t miss boy bands, baggy blue jeans, ice-white trainers, and sports T-shirts.
Then, this desire to sit at a desk and write it all down. Do you still have the passion? Was it a fad, a grandiose idea to write a novel, something to fill your days without the interruption of needing to look back?
The Writing Spirit it came. How long it will stay, you don’t know. Maybe it’s still coming. Or gone. Reading this, you’ll see the answer. You said you are filled with The Spirit of the Writer, so try to remember yourself that way, not as an old man, afraid to leave this planet and all the things you love.
Take the opportunity.
Imagine yourself being reborn on a fast-flying cloud, released by a flash of lightning, and turned up naked, carried by a wave to a distant shore.
You must write on, lose yourself in the depths of overgrown graves, mingle with the bones, sift through the dust, and promise to stay with the story long enough to watch each new character develop.
Trust that your life will run the same course writers did before you. Feel the same sun, drink from the same streams, see the same sights, and meet the changes and challenges they must have met while on their pilgrimage road.
An old man dreamed of becoming an author. Did you make it? You don’t have to be a genius to write a book, right? All the best authors, at least those you have liked, frequented bars.
Maybe you should write a book on the effects of beer-induced migraines. There’s no end to opportunities, right? Ask yourself, did you make it? Are you an author? Did you make it your craft to fill the empty page? Do your words carry the reader past Saturn on their way to Mars?
Was it all a Guinness-induced fantasy?
Have you become sad, enlightened, lost, or placed in a hospital bed because your caring family couldn’t decide whether you were weird, beaten to death by verbs, punished by commas, or just an old man plunged into enchanted visions of a different life on earth?
Can you still explain these future callings that curdle with religion and family? At the same time, you continue your literary journey, carried on a child’s tear, crossing boundaries no spacecraft could endure.
This Spirit? This thing? It allows you to live in a place where sunshine and rain are but words in a distant library, pleasure and pain but a velvety memory. You are carried onward by lunar electricity, distancing you from the behemoths and their rutting beauty, pushed on only by your imagination toward a life force of the future. You are exiled to live in bottomless journeying nights, shrouded in the violet fog of words.
Remember this about yourself. You were once young; love has grown older but not distant. You are the spoils of a long walk, captured by the misty rain, searching for those rosy fingers of fire to warm your face.
You are a fabulous opera, a whirlwind, a Cimmerian shore. You live in the darkest night in central parks, shopping malls, pool rooms, and the sandwich deli. You order beet salad or chicken from the spit.
You’re every river that went to every ocean, every moment, long or short. You are the outside and the inside, the distant and the near, the magician and the rabbit.
You are a mansion where dancing stands still. Yes, this is you! A writer carried on the backs of sea horses, sojourning among the archipelago of dreams. You drift with mermaids under waves of pearl, below clamouring birds, tossed and turned, and then make love on a thousand shorelines. You live in the wrecks of ships; your lungs are soddened with water. You’re a mindless hurricane. You’re a leviathan, grazing peacefully among the tranquillity of other prehistoric lives.
You’ve procrastinated, and in doing so, you have become the lateness of the hour, hearing the wind that drives the leaves through iron railings.
Stop with the doubt.
Be the quickening footfall through a hotel lobby, footprints in the snow in Amsterdam. Be the writer sitting on the Spanish Steps, listening to the whispers of lovers. You are the son of a fisherman, the face of many, the heart of all, and you are the space on which your words must fall.
Go on, friend, be the writer you want to be. Transported on childhood adventures, soaring on the heights of the day and riding the genius of trouble, be the child who once set every sail and for whom there was never a turning back. To do or to die, you are the knight riding the shore, crusading through the world’s torment, answering only to the Spirit of the Poor, the hermit, or the holy man.
You bathe in women’s juices like a butterfly in May, touch the tender membranes, split the keel, and sail ever onward. You’re the untouchable, looking for the mysterious beginning of your soul. Giving birth to characters who live in scented caverns, needing everything but neglect.
You, my friend, are a vulnerable child in the lower belly of literature.
Tell me…did you make good? Did you ever write that ‘Query Letter?’
Isn’t it time, old man?
More from Harry:
Karen Schwartz, Nancy Oglesby, Katie Michaelson, Bernie Pullen, Michelle Jimerson Morris, Amy, Julia A. Keirns, Tina, Pat Romito LaPointe, Brandon Ellrich, Misty Rae, Karen Hoffman, Susie Winfield, Vincent Pisano, Marlene Samuels, Ray Day, Randy Pulley, Michael Rhodes, Lu Skerdoo, Pluto Wolnosci 🟣, Paula Shablo, Bruce Coulter, Ellen Baker, Kelley Murphy, Leigh-Anne Dennison, Patricia Timmermans, Keeley Schroder, James Michael Wilkinson, Whye Waite, John Hansen, Trudy Van Buskirk, | Dixie Dodd | The Doctor — Joanie Adams| Adda Maria | Dennett | Men.21times@gmail.com | Nancy Santos | Jenny Blue | Jack Herlocker | Love | Barbara J. Martin | Audrey Clifford | Maria Rattray | Jerry Dwyer | Denise Shelton | Trisha Faye | StorySculptress | Deborah Joyce Goodwin (Red:The-Lady In Blue) | Kelly Corinne Elliott | Emma Vincent | izzibella Beau | Karen Grant | Shay Bishop | RosenberryRJ
(No offense will be taken if you dislike being tagged for various reasons. Please let me know, and I’ll be sure it doesn’t happen on my posts again. If, on the other hand, you’d grace me by allowing a tag, I’d be thrilled to add you.
