I work in a shop

My hands are cold. They type slowly. They don’t move much at home any more, now that I don't use them for writing. They curve around a teacup in the mornings, or fall heavy on top of the newspaper (that I don't read). They hold plates and sandwiches, knives and forks, but never pencils, never paper. They barely know how to press the remote for the tv set.

But throughout the day, they fight battles to hold onto money and piles of cds, dvd alarm frames and cold cups of coffee. I work in a shop, and long hours, my previous writing hours. It is as if my hands are allergic to touch when I leave after holding so many alarms, magnetic buttons, and thin metal discs.

I realise I write at work, all the time. The handing of change to customers has become an act of love, holding hands, and writing in them. It has made me silent and still, word empty, as if I am losing language.

I imagine writing into the customers’ hands, handing them not silver coins, but words.

“ONCE UPON A TIME, A WOMAN KNIT HERSELF A MAN OUT OF WOOL,”

I wrote into one hand, a right hand, scarred, middle aged, thick skin.

“SHE WAS A BIG-BONED WOMAN, AND MANY BALLS OF YARN WERE NEEDED TO DO THE JOB,”

whispered a 50 cent piece into another. A small girl with very pale skin got

“NO ONE ASKED HIM TO LOVE HER, BUT HE DID ANYWAY”

At the end of the queue approaching me, was a very tall guy about to buy a film for his wife,

“HER HUSBAND NEVER KNEW.”

His ring and the coins met with a clunk. The coin bounced from it and onto the floor, where a little boy quickly picked it up and put it into his mouth. His mother started a riot. Through the stereo playing, the boy crying, the mother yelling, the man apologising, and the heads turning, nobody but I could hear the word the boy had swallowed. I wrote it.

Not writing

I had a novel, and it slipped. One day I was thinking it, living it, the next day it was gone. My desires spread in all directions, loose legs. Some were transferred, unjustily, to somebody I didn’t really like, but who reminded me somehow of one of the characters I was writing about. His hair curled the same way, the neck bounced forwards when he walked. I saw him at a computer store, and I watched him, I watched the hair and the neck and the eyes, and I didn’t write it.

Or perhaps I did write. Can I ever stop the writing? Will it not need to stop itself? It felt as if I were writing, frenetically, but on an excercise bicycle, and that all the letters were just folding on top of the others. Like when I write emails or instructions, or copy something off a newspaper article. It was like in a dream, when you run but don’t get anywhere. I was being, doing, existing on some level, but unconscious to it all.

WRITING IS THE PASSING OF TIME.

These were the first words I wrote for several weeks.