Waking in the Grave

You get into your fifties and look over your shoulder and you discover that all the traces of you that you've left in this world are footprints in the snow, already melting away. You look back to the horizon where you started and you don't recognize the self that you see there. You can't believe that at almost every step of the way between there and here you managed to be too lazy, too blind, too drunk, too stupid, too stubborn or too scared to do what you really should have done. You see in that distant figure, staring across the empty years, a disappointment that only you can recognize. What the hell happened to me?

It's like suddenly waking in the grave.

But the casket lid hasn't clamped down on me yet; the crematorium flames aren't rising up around me. There is time. If I can just muster the will, there is time. If I start right now, break my old habits, turn off the too-worn path, there is time.

I have been a writer for almost 40 years. I have written speeches, scripts, screenplays, poems, love letters, and haiku. I have written things I am proud of and things I am ashamed of. But the one thing I have always wanted most to write -- a novel -- I cannot seem to write. I think, looking back, looking at myself even now, I have wanted it too much. I have tried too hard. Dinosaurs who had no sense of time or achievement or art or any intent of leaving traces behind managed without any effort at all to leave their tracks. They just walked forward, one step at a time.

This is my first step forward. I'm going to walk here because here I'm as anonymous as a long-dead dinosaur. If I succeed no might ever know who I was, but if I fail no one will know me either. That seems fair. That seems safe. Yes, I can walk here.