Spinning

The earth is spinning on its axis at 1000 miles an hour while it whips around the sun at  67,000 miles per hour.

And I can’t keep up.

I know what you’re thinking. I don’t need to. The earth is going to do its thing regardless of my thing and thanks to the magic of physics, we don’t even have to hang on.

But I’m not here just for the ride. I want to stand on the leading edge and see the sunrise before it knows its colors. I want to stick my toes out as we cross into autumn, feeling the bite of the coming cool just ahead of its arrival. I want to experience the things that haven’t happened yet before anyone can tell me about them.

Not so I can lord it over you and call, “First!” There isn’t time to consider you. Or me. The things that haven’t happened yet appear like a sudden recognition and disappear as quickly as that recognition bends into a memory. It’s not about being first. It’s about wanting to linger a moment longer in the company of the not yet. Because that’s where the unwritten stories live.

And some of those stories are mine.

I spend most of my time wrestling with words after they’ve already enjoyed a few spins. And I’ll keep doing that. This is the hard work of the writer.

But let me stand for a moment where the day and the night and the summer and the winter begin so I can see those stories before they break up in the atmosphere and fall to the earth like satellite shrapnel. Let me catch a glimpse of what the stories are meant to be, how they long to be told.

Then maybe when I climb back down through the clouds, settle into my seat in the coffee shop spaceship filled with fellow travelers who haven’t had a single thought about where the stories come from – maybe then I’ll be able to put the words together in a way that looks a little something like the sunrise before it knows its colors.