I can’t imagine it

Although I was not posting on the blog over the summer, it doesn’t mean that I wasn’t writing. It seems as though I am constantly writing. I do write a lot of Facebook posts, often many more than I should. I also write little stories and thoughts down in a journal. I’ll admit though, that recently the journal has been nearly as  neglected as the blog.

But I am always writing in my head.

As I drive, I write little commentaries in my imagination about the scenery, the weather, the other drivers. If I am waiting in line at a store, I write little dialogues in my head for the people I see and little vignettes around the observations I make as I shop. At work, when things get slow, I daydream about how I could write about the people I deal with, in a way that would maintain confidentiality and professionalism.

Unfortunately, very little of that great writing has ever made it to a computer screen, let alone a page. It always sounds so much better in my head. When it is put down in black and white, it seems to lose something.

So I don’t write much.

And I think a lot.

The other day, a coworker and I were on a long road trip together to see a client. The coworker and I know each other fairly well, although I wouldn’t say we are exactly friends. We don’t see each other outside of work or work-related activities.

To see us, it would not seem likely that we would have much in common. She is Latina, born in Ecuador, adopted as an infant and raised as an only child in a  Minnesota family. I am WASP, born in the Midwestern United States.  I would guess her age at mid-thirties. I am *ahem* NOT in my mid- (or even late, late) thirties. She worked as a police officer before going into social work. She then joined our office. I was an anti-authoritarian, not quite a hippie, young adult. I still don’t like “big brother”.

Somehow, we managed to fill 7 hours in a car together with conversation.

It didn’t get boring.

But if I were to have written the scene in my head, I would have been hard-pressed to figure out how it all would have worked. Even looking back on it, I am not sure as to exactly what we discussed, or how we managed to make that time pass with conversation.

It would be hard for me to transfer our actual conversation to the black and white words of the computer screen. Even in my head I have a hard time recreating it.

Maybe I am going to have the start turning on my phone’s recorder in order to have any chance of capturing the real world and recreating it in written words.

 

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