Cat Pollock Writes

Just a vague attempt at digesting/processing what's going through my head right now. The Moment It’s the moment when your personal alarm clock touches your shoulder at six in the morning with the news. Although the bedroom is bathed in darkness, and cluttered with everything you meant to pick up off the floor twenty-four hours ago, your mind makes the jerky jump from sleep to wakefulness and pulls your head away from its home on the pillow. It wills your legs over the edge of the bed and pulls you out, stumbling, towards some kind of light. It’s the moment when Grandma walks through the door, cheeks sagging, eyes dull, and shoulders slumped. The sight makes you recall her words two days earlier – “I’m fine, just as long as people don’t start trying to console me.” The ache inside of you is sudden, fierce, burning intensely, making you wish you were eight years old again and that just a hug from her could make the worst hurts disappear. But she’s the one who needs a hug from y...

It's the curse of the blinking cursor. Here it is, sitting innocently in the middle of the text box, waiting for me to find the words to type in so it has a point and purpose. It's never done anything to me. It just wants me to do something with it. And the problem isn't with the cursor. It's with me, the writer. I'm the one who can't find the words to say. I'm leaving the blinking cursor to just blink away... alone and miserable. All the reasons or excuses for it don't matter. This is my fault. *sigh* Right now, I feel a lot like the blinking cursor. Like I'm just sitting, waiting for God to type the next sentence, write the next word, in my story, and He hasn't done it yet. Has He stopped? Ah, no. But I just feel like He has - mostly because things aren't going exactly the way I imagined they would when He told me I was supposed to come back to Phoenix. Why I thought they would, I don't know. It's not like He's ever done ...

Surprise at the Terminal (Revised)* She sat by herself in a corner of the airport terminal, beat-up purple backpack at her feet, and an equally beat-up CD player sitting in her lap. The set of headphones covering her ears had seen better days, gray duct tape the only thing holding them together. A pair of faded jeans bearing evidence of a recent bleach spill covered her legs, and a baggy t-shirt and boldly striped flannel hung over her shoulders. Other passengers waiting in the terminal gave her a wide berth, but she seemed oblivious to them, her head bobbing and her lips moving in time to her music. Whoever this girl was, it was clear she was on her own and she preferred it that way. I don't know what brought me to sit down beside her. Maybe it was seeing other people walk past her, or maybe it was the antisocial stance she seemed to exude. Whatever it was, I never could have predicted what she did when I sat down. A bright smile crossed this girl's pixie-ish face and ...