Somewhere, A Clock Is Ticking

Dear You, 

Please forgive my absence. We've been working quite diligently on the new I Wrote This For You And Only You book. If you didn't know, it's a follow up to our original book, I Wrote This For You. The first book has the best entries from 2007-2011, this new book is the same, from 2011-2015. 

It looks great and contains beautiful full colour photography and, I believe, 200 entries in total. 

It's always very strange to go through a collection like this because it forces me to look at what was happening during that time of my life. While I've always said that I don't want to turn this into an 'emotional reality tv show', because that wouldn't be fair to the people who are close to me, there's always a part of me that comes through. 

I keep a notebook and a big, epic google document which is where I write ideas for things and the start of things, and I slowly put parts of myself into that as I go about my day, sentences that stick in my head and so on, then Jon sends me a picture, and I say, "Well, of course, that picture was meant for this." 

That's not always true, sometimes Jon sends me a picture and it suggests the words. It's all always been chaotic and organic.    

But when it's all put together, when it's collected, I can always see something, a shape , like the poems are all pixels in a bigger picture. 

That's when my father died. That's when my wife's mother died. That's when we got married. That's when I was on top of the world. That's when I was below it. That's something else. That's nothing else. And so on. 

I know you'll see something else when you look at it, and I'm glad for that. I've never wanted to beat somebody over the head with a piece of writing and go, "Understand me! This is about this!" because once you've written something down, you no longer own it. The person who reads it owns it and they, hopefully, will own something different to what you wrote, the things that fill in the space between the valleys and the peaks of the words on the page. 

This is when your child got sick. This is when your grandfather died. This is when you fell in love. This is when you fell apart. This is when you were somewhere else. 

Whatever you find, and whatever you own, I hope that the act of finding it makes you feel less alone. 

Being found, has always made me feel less alone. 

I can never thank you enough for that. 

- pleasefindthis/Me 

 

__

P.S. 

I'm also desperately trying to finish a book that I've owed someone for quite a while, called "How To Be Happy." 

To be honest, I don't even know if I know what it's about anymore. I had this idea that because I've dealt with depression quite a bit in my life, that maybe I could write a book about dealing with it, but the book has ended up being something else. I keep writing it, deleting it, writing it, deleting it and I rinse and repeat. Anyway, the clock is ticking on that and it's getting pretty serious. I am way, way past the deadline. 

There's also ten other things going on in the background. I know most of them will fail but I also know that if I do ten things, at least one of them will work. So I do a lot because the one that works, is always worth it. 

And I must get back to it.