Lighthouses and Stoplights

1. I'm now a tweeter. And my twit is buhnanna

2. I write first lines and brief beginnings to novels I never finish. In a way, it’s a quirky hobby I sincerely enjoy indulging in. In another it’s inexplicably unavoidable and accompanies an odd sense of obligation.

Either way, I doubt I’ll ever be a published author, and I highly doubt I’ll ever write anything worth reading.

But what I write isn’t for anyone else. I like to think of it as a convenient way to make a daily release of some pent-up soul; little bits of the true, unknown me struggling to get out and make a lot more sense once I can analyze them on paper. I get to know myself a little better with each line I write, and, if I’m lucky, take one step nearer to understanding the wilderness of mystery that is my thoughts. A line came to me the other day while sitting at a stoplight:

There I sat, the muffled Gwen Stefani song barely audible on the radio, and my mind dazedly wandering past the crammed intersection and long line of Friday rushers at the bank to some indistinguishable oasis in the corner of my mind that oddly included a lighthouse and lonely pair of sneakers:

I wonder what they’re doing there, I thought, the faded blue
high-tops half submerged in the low tide, rocking endlessly over the rocky shore
with the rhythmic pulse of the waves. Their pathetic plight evoked wordless
images, like some distant memory from a dream just a little too far back in
consciousness to recall. But the light turned green, and off I went, with one
more vague idea I might jot down in my tattered flower notebook later if I had a
minute during work. But even though my mind continued its habitual wandering as
I followed my familiar route down pothole-ridden roads scorched with the heat of
summer and neglect of decades, the distant taste of salty spray lingered on my
tongue. And in a remote part of an unexplored, untouched portion of my brain, I
dimly agreed with myself that the dignified old lighthouse on the ridge with its
flaking white paint and rickety railing of faded red was, indeed, much more like
reality than the familiar Shell station up ahead, dutifully indicating my next
turn.