Mental Poltergeists

I have been lax about writing of late. I have all of these pieces rattling, half finished, behind the confines of my daily life. They are like mental poltergeists flinging things around and disturbing the force of my concentration. I can sense them in the corners of my mind. I feel their presence as I wander through the rooms of my psyche. I simply fail to see them dead on.

When I turn my head I catch a glimpse in my emotional periphery, but they have no reflections in the mirrors that are my eyes. They won't come out to play in the open. Instead, they send warning volleys into the middle of the floor. They tease me with their almost-presence and haunt me in the night.

I can perceive them lurking in dark corners, and shrinking from the light of my pen. But always, always, they are there. Waiting. Waiting. Waiting to be written. Secretly hoping that I'll find the incantation that lets them loose on the world. Wishing to be freed to the relative concreteness of paper.

I can feel them brush past me -- laughing, always laughing at me -- as I'm drifting off to sleep at night. I startle at their touch, and am instantly wide awake. Maddeningly, I am rarely fast enough to catch one by the toe as it leaps, cackling maniacally, over my head. It's shrill snicker frustrates my writer's spirit as it dances past me in the darkness.

I have to sneak up on these hide-y pieces. I can't catch these directly. I am forced to come at them from the side while whistling a merry I-don't-care-if-you're-written tune all the while. Only then can I reach out, lightning fast, and pin one to the page, like the literary equivalent of a butterfly collector adding a short-lived luna moth to her collection.

And when I do, I crow a triumphant "how do you like me now" to the others and feel them lean in a little closer...silently wishing to be next.

© Tanya Anguita