The Twenty-Fourth Second

It’s terrifying how fleeting a thought can be.  Inspiration expires more quickly than the milk I buy to make coffee clouds.  It’s a hiccup.  The world goes bright white in a flash, a silence and then the wonderful image of your muse, the image you wait up all night for, knowing she’s nocturnal.  It’s like the screen during a bad horror film.  A strobe of light and a quick shot of a little girl, bearing her teeth, with black holes for eyes.  And then it’s gone. 

You have exactly twenty-three second to reach a piece of paper, a typewriter, a laptop, the pale of your forearm, and ink the image or the word or, if you’ve been particularly lucky that night, a whole line.  You must go blindly to that pen.  If along the way, as you trip over table legs and tennis shoes, you are drawn into conversation or see a black and white photo of your mother on the mantle, it is useless.  Your mind will wander, the muse will have done her work for the night for nothing.  If you happen to be drifting into slumber when she shows herself, right there on the edge of a foggy cliff, about to jump and fly over the ruins of the underworld, you mustn’t tell yourself that you’ll remember in the morning.  Even rolling to the side to scribble your notes on a pad beside your bed will do no good.  In the morning, that mess of letters that barely form words will mean nothing to you.  You must leap from your bed with eyes still closed and you must write until every precious thought she has given you is on the page.  Leave the paper in the typewriter overnight.  When you wake, reread the note she’s left you there.  You’ll be amazed how lovely she can be at such an angry hour.

I try to imagine all of the brilliance that is lost in that twenty-fourth second.  The stories we’ll never know.  We get one chance.  She doesn’t ever tell us the same things twice.