Thesis Project-68 days

Today I wrote 3,759 words.  Total number of pages now is 20.  Today was probably one of my most productive writing days.  I arrived at the cafe in Borders at around 11:45 am.  I ordered the usual from the cafe,  a medium vanilla soy latte.    I opened the last draft I had worked on last week Thursday.  I began to scroll down through the ten pages in front of me when I arrived at a paragraph I wanted to add more meat to.  I worked on a memory of the fourth grade and decided to add new characters in this scene.  Three of my fourth grade classmates.  I realized that I was able to remember as far as where they sat in the class and what their most memorable attributes were.  I was enjoying putting them onto the page and adding short "fourth grade" dialogue to this aspect of the scene.  I spent about 15 minutes on this portion and then moved on to a more surreal scene for me.  I elaborated on my younger sister's temporary placement in an orphanage in 1988.  I dug deep into what I was experiencing at the time and tried to re-count all the ways that my emotion could be set on the page.  It was a very difficult task and I know that I'll have to go back and add, remove, edit and/or change the order of events.  What struck me was that about thirty minutes into the 'orphanage' piece, I was pummeled with the the grief that I had experienced 22 years prior.  My fingers began to tremble on the keyboard and my breathing became shallow.  I had to stop for a few minutes to regain my composure.  The scene that brought me back to this state of anguish was when I was reunited with my baby sister after her stay at the orphanage.  I brought my hands up to my face and pushed my reading glasses up on my forehead and felt the tears well up in my eyes.  I took a long deep sigh and just let the feeling pass through like a crashing wave that comes in an instant and then subsides.  I wasn't quite prepared for the tsunami of emotions that would come flooding into my present world.  One thing is having a distant memory of something tragic and the other is re-experiencing it fully in the present moment.  My fingers tingled and my heart was racing to capture every bit of emotion that I thought I had lost so long ago.  I was wrong about lost emotions.  I was wrong about not being able to accurately document my experience.  Today I learned that no matter how much time has been position in between a deeply tragic moment, you never lose the ability to re-visit it when you allow yourself to feel it fully.  

So long for now and just keep writing...

V.