Where My Imagination Goes

My imagination has lived, these past many months, within the agitation of conflicting eras and places.

There were the three rounds of copy edits for The Heart is Not a Size, returning me again and again (in my mind's eye) to a squatters village in Juarez. There was all the final shaping of Dangerous Neighbors, so that there I was, walking (feeling as if I were walking) the crowded streets of 1876 Philadelphia. There were the first and second drafts of my novel for adults, which dreamed me toward the wreckage of an abandoned insane asylum. And there was Penn, the advanced nonfiction class, where I gave myself over to the landscape of memoir and narrative nonfiction.

On the afternoons when I danced there was nothing in my head but song.

Projects come to an end. The imagination grows lonely. There is no time at the moment to be anything, do anything but work and home.

But I feel that inevitable emptiness ticking, a desire to go somewhere far and unknown, a desire to make something new knowable.