A Wonderful Story

Once, I wrote a wonderful story.  It rolled onto the paper, smooth and fine and set me in a good mood for days.  And then one thing happened and then another, and the story, written in one of a myriad of notebooks I was scribbling in at the time, got buried among other notebooks and papers and fliers and magazines.

Today, while trying to think of what to write, I remember that story and want to find it so I can post it, since today I must post something in order to feel good about myself, and it can't be a song, because my last post was a song, and it's too soon for another Le Flaneur, and even though I have 335 unique drafts on this blog, and am often hopeful to find some gem there, inevitably, when opening them, each makes me feel more deflated than the previous.

So if I find the wonderful story I already wrote, then I won't have to write something new today.

While looking for the wonderful story, I find lists half accomplished, pipe dream rantings, CDs still in plastic, forms that should have been filled out, unfinished letters, unsent postcards, magazines opened to articles half read, school photos still uncut, illegible notes to self, reminders to go to events that I forgot to attend, clipboards, coupons, announcements, starts to novels and screen plays and memoires, mislabeled file folders, failed drawings, scratch paper, titles of books I want to read and movies I want to see, and $2.43 in change.

I give up and begin to craft the excuse as to why I won't be able to post anything today. After all, I have a lot of other things to do and the weather is lovely and won't be for much longer and there's classes to prepare for and courses to sign up for and gifts to buy and mail, and so many thank you letters to write.  I go to get my coat and notice the stack of papers I cleared from my desk several months back and dumped in a corner, meaning to go through them later, which I never did.  There I find more miscellany and the notebook I recognize as the one that contains the wonderful story.

I cheer and make some coffee and sit in the sunlight streaming into the kitchen, ready for a good read. I open the notebook, so excited to have found it, finally, the wonderful story I wrote.  But all too soon my enthusiasm drains as I realize that the wonderful story I wrote isn't so wonderful after all, but just a sketch, an idea, scant and malnourished, not unlike so many of the drafts piling up, so hopefully conceived, so dejectedly abandoned.