When life steals your lemons have some cold sugar water

I had an idea that I forgot, it was an idea and a possible opening to introduce it and a change of direction then an ending, and the combination of scrubbing out the sink - between the time spent standing outside waiting for buses, especially with this latest cold snap, and all the immersing of my hands in water from dishes and from washing my hands after changing the baby’s diaper, my skin is cracked and bleeding in multiple places and it hurts a little and the thought of all these holes in my armor and all the germs that crawl all over every surface in my child-ridden home, germs carried in by the little traitors from the filthpens of public library children’s areas and the plaguefarms of play rooms at the science museum and the diseasepits of the 5th birthday we attend yesterday, all those germs gunning, leering, drunken and slapping each others’ backs, for the moist, warm pink holes that have opened all over my hands, I keep thinking of them and knowing I am sure to get a head cold and stomach flu and so even less sleep, even less work done, even more irritation as I go through the motions daily - and helping my older children with navigating the complications of an ever faster internet and our cheap, old, janky laptops opened a window and the young idea with its fledging plumage of essay structure flitted out to die in the snow.

I feel a blinking certainty, flickering like the light in our entryway that I keep not getting around to changing, the flashing of which brings headaches and give the house from the outside a haunted house Blair Witch look. When the certainty flicks on I am sure this was a good idea, a genuine opportunity to do something worth doing and now that it’s lost I won’t get another for months, years, ever, a rare shot and I didn’t take it, paused too long, distracted by the crowd of jeering and yelling about crashing browsers, the photo of me staring into space fingers not typing could go in a scrapbook of couldabeens if I let myself keep it (I want so much to keep it). When it flicks off I am sure it was crap like all the ideas, not worth having, at best a turd I might spit shine to fool the gullible, of course myself the king of rubes, the mark I most want to fool.

It might have been an idea about bees. I don’t think it was bees - but maybe, the thing about forgetting is that the more you forget the less know of what it is you don’t know - I just typed bees because that’s what came out after the word bees, I’m just letting the fingers do the work. I don’t know that I should trust them as I only use about six of them while typing, seven if you count the right ring finger’s perch on the delete key. It’s the finger most in touch with my writing brain, delete all of it it’s all garbage, erase even the evidence of the attempt, let there be no proof I even made the effort. My ring finger is the loyal screw doing the work of prison warden in the confines of my self-doubt, none of this is good no one will care and everyone will at the same time hate it better to have not even made the effort, ring finger rationalizes its tapping on and holding of the delete key as serving and protecting, preventing the exposure of my fraud and failure. Traitorfinger. But yeah it wasn’t about bees. It was about… about… E.B. White? No. It’s gone.

I don’t know what it was. It’s fine. It’s not fine, I’m disappointed, but I’ve lived with bigger ones, a small thing really, a stubbing of the toe of the heart, a bit of cursing and hissed breathing through the teeth and then the pain subsides, that’s how this always works. After all this isn’t the first forgotten idea.

Perhaps there’s a heaven of ideas that didn’t get to be taken up. There’s something appealing to their pure potential, unsullied by the sweat of effort and the flaws of execution, these charming fantasies, innocent maybes, angelic wouldntitbecools. In the heaven of ideas that didn’t get a shot they flit around and a better class of doer gives them multiple forms, essays, scripts, drawings, collage, architecture… that was it! It was cockroaches, not bees, and it was a blueprint, a skyscraper about cockroaches. It will never be. Instead it didn’t even manage to be 800 words about its own absence and my narcissistic doubts. The pity the pity the pity.