The room is mostly white and turquoise or teal. There is an abstract painting of what I like to think is a wave, hanging over the bed. Technically it’s the guest room, but I use it as my office.
This is the desk I write upon, covered almost completely with the bulky limitations of technology. Two screens, a keyboard, the black snakes of cords coiled behind each monitor, the inexhaustible whir of a used laptop that sounds like it has tech asthma. Then the Breathing Buddha, a white rubber light roughly in the shape of this deity, sexless and with a placid smile, that lights up green, purple and blue – some kind of 4-7-8 breathing technique that’s meant to relax you. The pictures my children have drawn hanging above my desk, along with the postcards and glossy prints that I’ve collected since I was a teenager: Klimt’s Water Serpents, Khalo’s Life and Death, ad from a now defunct brand of liquor that was popular in 1930’s Europe. Then: a postcard from the African Women’s Collective in Tel Aviv – an African woman in bright prints staring unflinchingly at the camera, my son’s unsmiling face on a construction paper heart. The pink weeping willow tree my daughter drew. Seated, these things inspire me for different reasons. Unless I move my adjustable desk up to standing position, and then most of the art is obscured. I stand one-legged, like a human flamingo while I work, my knee on the desk chair.
The glass paperweight my mother gave me sits on the surface of the desk. It feels out of place – a relic of the 20th century on a very 21st century standing desk that I bought in the middle of a pandemic. But the paperweight is for luck. That’s what she had said when she gave it to me – it brought her luck and success. It used to sit on her desk at work when she was a TV producer, the year she won an Emmy. The paperweight is a glass orb with a pink and blue sketch of birds perched on an antique teacup. One bird is wearing a crown. This is inexplicable, the same way it defies logic to have a paperweight in the 21st century. But I keep it anyway, because even though I claim I’m not superstitious, I am.
Next to the desk is a narrow bookshelf with the books on writing. I glance at them while working but rarely have time to crack them open. I am hoping instead that they give me wisdom through some kind of bibliophilic osmosis. My eyes travel over Bird by Bird, Room to Write, Writing Down the Bones. And I imagine I am. Writing down all the bones, bird by bird, in this room to write. Sometimes I really do. In between meetings or after everyone has gone to sleep, I write by the glow of the three lamps in here. Often it’s garbage, but it doesn’t matter. The point is to show up to the page, and just write. So I do.
I read an author say once that it's not about publishing, although of course as a writer you want that - to see your words and your work out there in the world. The best part is the writing. But it's also the worst part. Both of these things are true. I've posted it here, because I need to see it in my face every day. I want to frame it and hang it on the wall of this white and teal and gold room that looks like a quaint guest room in an Airbnb in New Mexico and not the spare room where I work, in a quiet suburb of metro Detroit.
It has to be about the writing. Because this is what I do, at my white standing desk with the obsolete bit paperweight and my fancy journals and dozens of books on writing. Comfort objects. Motivators. Like a veritable worry stone, I keep them close so I can keep on. I write, because it's all I know how to do; it's the only thing I understand.
The sign on the door says, "The Witch is In," and it's true. You can find me here, always.
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