On the Inside Looking Out

You'll have to forgive me if I seemed to be nonexistent these last few days. I was, you see, living inside a story that I'd written, and I couldn't move out until it was finished. Based on childhood impressions that I've kept with me all these years, it was necessary to travel back to that time and take up residence once again in the world I occupied at the time, or a reasonable facsimile thereof. So this meant that I had to pack all my emotional bags and bring them with me for the duration, as I am never sure just when I'll emerge completely from inside a story.




This time around, I went back to the 1960's and to a house I'd known as a child. I didn't live in the house, at least not in a real sense. But it appropriated enough of my imagination that I was fully able to enter it and spend a considerable amount of time there absorbing its energy and storing lots of impressions away as well.




Many writers will tell you that they are introverts, as I am; and as such, that means that we spend, or have spent in our lives, a great deal of time living inside our heads where all that we've seen, done, and felt is stored away and keeps us company. It's a lot like a box of mementos, only we writers go through ours a lot more often than other people do, because, well, we don't have a choice really.


Those impressions and memories never give us a moment's peace, so that it sometimes appears to other people as if we are living in the past, when nothing could be further from the truth. We're not living IN the past, but WITH the past ever at our beck and call; and sometimes, if we're lucky, all those impressions, all that sensory information, comes together into what we like to call stories, because there really is no other word that adequately sums up what they are.




And so the last few days, that's where I've been...in that little house in Biddeford, Maine, or on the path leading to it as well as on the corner of the street I grew up on...reliving some of the experiences I had almost 50 years ago, and watching them all come together, almost like a small cyclone picking up everything in its path, and then redepositing it something that is only a shadow of what that time was like and how it affected me.




But I'm back now, for the time being anyway, until I am once again whisked off to some other initially undisclosed place that may as well be a million miles, and as many light years away, but that has been right here with me all along.


https://www.amazon.com/Rachel-Lovejoy/e/B00JJ259DS