My writing exercise for my memoir class last night:
So. I am bicycling home, having left work early with a perfectly valid excuse. I had broken my toe in a wee-hour, four-person free-for-all to observe the super blue blood moon this morning. Because there is no internal signal my body cannot willfully misinterpret, the pain central processing unit of my body has gone all “CODE RED-CODE RED” over a minor fracture of that awkward, nameless toe next to the pinky. Just like that, the wrist I twisted unicycling this weekend suddenly begins hollering “Me too! Me too!,” which means my gut, who usually monopolizes attention in this arena, acts the jealous organ and offers its best rendition of a theatrical death throw. In my head I’m chanting this idea I have for the writing assignment I’m working on about a memoir on missing memories. Because I’m bicycling and Siri refuses to acknowledge my existence, I cannot jot it down. After ten intersections and a suspicious amount of mid-day traffic, I pull up the drive, maneuver my beast of a bike through the gate, and since my kids never do, I pull the garbage to the curb and then the recycling, and then I think to pick up the mail. When I finally get inside through the back door because the side door swelled shut in the last six hours, I turn off auto-pilot and go to manual override. There I find that the pain sirens have won the shouting match with the memory mantra, and I head to the medicine drawer leaving my journal to sunbathe on the coffee table that attacked my toe this morning.