unravelling moments

There are moments which are made up of too much stuff for them to be lived at the time they occur.

― John le Carré, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

sometimes i feel as if the very thing i love about writing threatens to drive me insane: the process of turning a thought or a scene over and over again in my mind, dissecting it, re-assembling it, imagining (or remembering) how it smells, sounds, tastes and feels in a hundred different permutations.

the first scene i ever saw in my mind’s eye was a vast prairie of sunflowers in full bloom under an open sky, and a little girl, in love, staring up at their shimmery petals. when i was first discovering how much i loved to write scenes - it started out as scenes for me, not plot or character development - this ability to concoct and recall the most minute detail was an unencumbered gift. and then, over the years, my gift slowly morphed into a burden as i found myself using it less and less to imagine delightful stories and more as a nagging rumination which began to unravel my waking moments, decomposing each experience into tiny, molecular components. what were the precise two words she said before sipping from her cup? i would ask myself after meeting a friend for coffee. did her bangs fall to the left or the right side of her face? was her sigh an expression of anguish or exhaustion? i did not rest until i remembered or settled on a plausible descriptor.

i love the john le carré quote above because it exquisitely captures how i’ve often felt about moments in my life: that they were brimming with too much, overwhelming my senses and my ability to process one thing after the other. and so i carry on and continue to write, re-living and unraveling those bursting moments one by one, and hope that in doing so i will eventually arrive at an understanding of things which is warm and therapeutic rather than cold and prickly and numb.