How to spend twelve days alone in a cabin in the woods with no one to talk to

July 27, 2007

I wake up and start writing immediately, taking my laptop out to the rocking chair on the sun porch with oatmeal, blueberries, and tea. Before lunch, 1,000 words.

I run through the meadow. The grass and flowers are overgrown and they slice my legs. I watch three deer race up the hill.

After lunch I go on a long bike ride, up and down the winding country roads. There are no traffic lights, no traffic, so I ride fast, and for hours. I eat flies. This county is 99.9 percent white, and sometimes people stare. Unlike every single day in Brooklyn at least I never get men honking and leaning out of cars and smacking their lips together and shouting comments about my ass and how I am sitting on a bicycle and on that ass and working it, yeah, working it baby.

I don’t lock the doors. I never lock the bike.

I check my e-mail once a day if the weather permits. There is a combination doctor’s office, fitness center, and internet café outside of the nearest town. I bet my productivity would be a lot higher at home if I had to walk a few miles to check my e-mail.

The lake is down the hill and across the street. In the afternoons I wade out to the dock, lie down, and read. I drink lemonade and eat potato chips. I read seven books in twelve days. Each one is amazing. When it gets hot I slide off the dock and swim. The sky is impossibly blue.

One day it rains so hard I can’t leave the meadow. I spend the entire day reading, writing, and reading some more. I don’t speak to anyone until midnight. So this is cabin fever. Everything I do comes out in a frantic narrative in my head. She moves through the cabin. Night falls. It is time for a bath.

At night I look at the stars. I wear bizarre outfits–a sundress over pajama pants tucked into tall socks and an oversized sweatshirt on top of it all–and stalk the fireflies. I wish on shooting stars. I get crazy lonely. The darkness is absolute, overwhelming. For a few hours there is a power outage and I sit in the dark, hardly breathing, unable to even make my way across the room. The quiet is not as I expected–when the sun goes down a symphony of insects begins performing. Lying in bed, I pull the covers over my head when I hear mice scratching the floorboards.

The words haven’t come so easily for years. Writing is fun again. Knock everything down, clear it all out, and the words will come. They haven’t disappeared. Self-doubt, which visits me on average about 50 times a day, doesn’t even knock on the door once.

I finish three story drafts, the equivalent of writing a novella. For the first time I finally see the light at the end of the tunnel in finishing this collection. It’s taken a year and a half to pound out a full first draft, a silent triumph. I have ten stories. 70,000 words. Book length. I want to cry with relief. If I spend the next few months editing and re-writing these drafts, I might have something I’m actually happy with by the end of the year.

My characters buy real estate in my dreams. My dreams are vivid and maddening.

I understand now why people have to go away like this to work, and how I could never work this way day in, day out. It’s too intense, like doing nothing but sprints. And you can’t live in a vacuum.

I miss my friends, my apartment. I feel like I’ve been away forever.

* * *

I’ve been back in NYC this past week and next. Today, doing my laundry and freelance work in Jersey. I’m supposed to be leaving for Berlin in eight days but my expedited passport renewal has not yet arrived. “There are no guarantees it will get there on time,” says the woman I spoke to on the phone at the passport agency. “It is currently two-thirds done in the processing.” What does that mean? I ask her. “That means that there is one-third left to go.

2007-07-27  ::  iamlisako