a bad work project and a trip back east have conspired to keep me from finishing my last difficult scene. more to the point, though, this is the first time i have been separated from the work since i began, at least for more than a day or two. we are on day 11 now of being away from home, which is to say away from the work as well as all the other things that go with the concept home.
add to that the always-disconcerting feeling of being in my old home, and the homesickness that provokes, and it is all provoking strange thoughts in me. i am dwelling on the work, of course, but far more sensually than i have been for some time: thinking of it not in terms of plot but of touch and taste and smell, texture, the flavor of air and the public texts and the smell of bodies as they go about their day. perhaps, then, this is a positive to take from this abrupt rupture–that i have not instantly forgotten the work, but instead can feel it simmering in me still; that its environment is still incubating and growing in my mind.
those are the positives. the negatives are that it has heightened the sense that i am guessing every writer has, at least every writer who immerses in an imagined world, no matter how fantastic: the sense of committing a kind of emotional adultery with your family. i should be here, now, but a small part of me is always there; when left alone with my thoughts they drift back there, like sneaking off for a rendezvous; i even jump and act guilty when caught daydreaming. an act fraught with a vague sense of financial privilege as well: to be able to leave the mundane at will, to transport yourself at the drop of a hat, feels like an extremity of wealth, like winning a lottery but not telling anyone. when did daydreaming become so fraught?