Run Out of Words

I haven't been posting lately.  I feel I have run out of words.  My entire life I have written words in my head, but right now they have vanished.  At night I write novels and forget them when I wake up, this has always been the case.  Lately, no stories, no words - zip, zilch, nada.  I go to bed unable to construct a story to fall asleep.  I am sleeping well, just not surrounded by characters.  My buckle has not been swashed by pirates.  I have not scaled Mt. Fuji.  I have not had tea with Thomas Jefferson in Paris.  I haven't been on an archeological dig in ages.

I can't seem to muster interest in relating the oddities of people around me.  For example, on my way back from San Diego after passing through the body scan machines the woman in front of me said, "you can smell the radiation!"  I didn't have a snappy answer for her.  My response was, "radiation doesn't have a smell."  You know what, having been radiated almost thirty times I do know what it smells like -NOTHING.  It feels like torture, but has no smell until you smear burn cream on black flaking skin.

I could tell you about Ned's very important story,  a "true story" according to Ned. There once was a boy with very dry skin.  It was very serious.  It was on his neck.  In fact it was really lint.   I had no words for him after he told me this story.  This is up there with Ellen's poem, I bought a duck for a buck.  I didn't tell him about the beauty of dryer lint after you have washed brand new colored towels.

I don't even have the words to tell you about getting fake eyelashes.  It was a spur of the moment decision and one I felt quite foolish about.  Truthfully and vainly, I derived great pleasure from the eyelashes and the fact that people even noticed them.  All was swell until the first little cluster of three fell off at dinner.  With a final hurrah they all jumped ship except for maybe six of them.  Now it just looks weird.   As heroine of my own stories, I always have long, lush eyelashes.

I don't know, maybe all the words are crowded and stuck into a little brain cranny.  Perhaps the words are all shoved to the side by homework, laundry, shopping lists, missing socks, unfinished/unstarted quilting ideas, and worry over holding an imploding body together.  I miss my words.