I opened an unfinished manuscript today. The story started rattling in my head again a wee while ago, and I didn’t know where I left it. It turns out I left it in the same place it was two years ago, when I left a note to myself in the margin saying “I’ve been stuck in this spot for two years, I’m not sure what to do.”

So that’ll be four years then?

Last weekend I walked along the river on a grey day with an old friend. We spoke and listened to each other in a way that seemed both natural and distant all at once. Natural in that it was the how friends should chat and distant in that it seems so long ago that any of that was natural. We dodged runners and cyclists and dogs delighted to be out and about and took photos of the things everyone else was just walking by. A tree here, a mushroom there. Stumps that looked far more ancient than they could have been. Nature bursting all around, even in winter, while folks and quadrupeds walked or ran or stumbled along seeing the woods and the river but not seeing the water and the trees and the branches. The green of the leaves held that dark shadow you only get on a cloudy winter’s day. There’s no other green like it. It’s a green with secrets.

I added a few sentences to that manuscript. I don’t know if it broke the block on it but the words felt like the correct ones. Glacial writing projects still move, if you let them, they just move slower and cut deeper.

A great fallen tree lay in the bushes and ivy and fungi with a cast iron fence bisecting it. I thought it made the tree younger than its size suggested and the fence older than its design suggested. I think it fell within the last few years, likely in an autumn or winter storm. It looked like something from a Dali painting. And so I thought of the Dali exhibit in Ceret all those years ago, a brilliant retrospective that finished with a black and white photo of the man himself sucking on the head of a massive prawn. It might not have been the last image of the exhibit, but it’s the last image I remember seeing.

I need to reread the rest of the manuscript, in hopes that knowing what else I wrote might suggest some hints of what I should write afterwards. I need to write more in general. I need to finish the whisky book, rewrite the other novel, start writing a different novel, and remind people that I do write books and if they haven’t read them they should do, and if they could buy them and leave a nice review as well, that would be lovely.

The unpruned plane trees stood tall and wild like ivy-covered Rorschach tests. The paths of their branches didn’t just stretch out to grab the sunlight, but to grab the sunlight by taking the most remarkable paths possible. Relentless zigging and zagging to create extraordinary patterns in defiance of any manner of accepted design. Stripped of their leaves by the cold and the season, it was as though a collection of raw nerves and neurons were reaching for the sky. I nearly got lost in it all. On the ground, the ivy with its secretive green and the scattered fallen lumber provided a compass.

Finding my way back to writing, to writing here as well, has taken some time. It’s been nearly two years since I wrote of the dream about my father. If it’s to come at a glacial pace so be it. Let it move slower as long as it cuts deeper.