My view

I am at the community library, admittedly eager to be taken in distraction because it strains less than the work I am trying to do. I listen to the man on the phone who asks the other end her blood type. I watch an unknown hand play with the electric blinds on the wall facing me, up and down, up and down, up and down. I'm slightly annoyed. I stare out the windows to my right: how the dirt patterns resemble that of brown trout, how even dirt accumulates beautifully. I scan the books on the shelves to my left: Programming Video Games for the Evil Genius and Naturally Fun Parties for Kids and Ventriloquism  and George Harrison: Living in the Material World. Apparently, I'm sitting in the nonfiction section of the library, which explains why the writing is giving me grief. Too many kinds of truth.

Suddenly, as suddenly as any plot twist happens in the kind of truth I write, a young woman walks into the scene pushing a stroller and corralling a toddler. "Say hi to Daddy," she says, and the toddler clambers onto a young man sitting by the blinds. His cheek-kisses are loud. The woman unstraps a blonde baby girl from the stroller and adds her to the dad's arms. Then the woman sinks into the kitty-corner couch and watches.

So different from my life.

Sometimes I resist sharing how eager anxious desperate afraid impatient I am to know what that feels like (a family, a husband, a child). That tune's been sung so many times before; no need to add. But it's still my heart and still my song, so today, I'm owning it.