morning problems

So I’m writing first thing in the morning, but of course my mind betrays me after last night’s listing of evening distractions. This morning’s distractions are the what-can-I-possibly-write-about kind.

Things that you need to pay special attention to might want to arrive with small signs indicating that. When an event happens at the beginning of a movie or play its position there says pay particular attention to me. But in life the events aren’t separated out in that way. There’s no way to know if this conversation will have immense later significance or if the lateness caused by missing this green light will alter your day so significantly that it might change your entire life. They should have little stickies on them, tiny neon post it notes.

I’ve never been back to the Athens Airport. My flight out of the enormous Eleftherios Venizelos was the last time I stepped on Greek soil. During the time I was visiting Greece – two visits in just over a year – I felt as though I was working on the story. But in the years (yes, years) since all construction has ceased. As I look back over my notes from the last visit I find I can make no sense of them, waiting seven years has not added to the little sense they made in the beginning. (I must improve my note taking strategies.) Of the long list of people I interviewed after the visits, many are probably dead now. And even if they’re not, I’d be embarrassed to call them back again now and ask the same questions again. I never understood at the time I was talking to them the trajectory of the narrative and so my questions and my notes were undefined. Often the people were often only tangentially related. And my interview skills were minimal. As I attempt to retrieve the strands of this story, I’m not sure what to do with these folks, these partial interviews illegibly annotated in unintelligible shorthand. I feel as though I’m constructing these tiny bits from memory. It’s an archaeological dig in my fading memory. A word sets off a memory of talking with someone. But only the strongest, most consistent, strands keep surfacing. So it seems all the same story. I could never imagine the trajectory of the narrative. That’s why the interviews all seem so faint – they were faint as they happened, not one single neon sticky. I did have an idea, but it involves writing a totally different narrative – not fiction, not even really about Belle. But about the futile act of trying to track her down and the intertwining of my story about her with my friend’s story about her mother’s crazy husband Donald. Donald and Belle. Now there’s a story.