The Slow-Cooked Sentence

As a girl I lived next to a lake of hardpan that was impermeable to water. When it was dry the salt flat was as good as concrete, perfect for riding a bike or playing basketball. When it rained it became an enormous puddle, and I’d crouch at its rim to watch clouds skim over this mirrored sky, and at the brine shrimp that hatched. With a stick I’d write on the clay bottom until the water grew milky and the words disappeared. Days would pass. The lake shrank, and a ring of salt crusted at the shoreline. I’d take a fingernail, scratch off crystals and lick them away.

In December I stopped writing. I didn’t miss it, but neither did I like the taste of life no longer salted for my tongue. The decision to misplace the pen and cover my notebook with a stack of other people’s books might have something to do with reaching mid-life: I’ve caught myself revisiting, re-evaluating, re-scaling dreams so they were smaller and more modest. This hurt. Jeez, I thought, I may just as well curl up and die.

Or I may just as well say fuck, my life needs more salt to make the sweet sweeter, to take the edge off bitterness. So I’ve returned to the table and I hope you’ll pull up a chair, because we’re in this together, equal parts sodium and chlorine. Writing isn’t solitary, but a meal made for two, me and you, bearing witness to each other’s artistic work, responding to and encouraging the existence and value of our creations.