Starting small

We decide to give each other a little prompt.

Because when life is too big, too much, too overwhelming to write about, but you know you need to write; what you need isn't a pen or a keyboard, or book, or blog, it's somewhere to start.

The subject delivered via text message is "an item that brings you joy", so I sit on the bus and I think about all the things I own, and I try to assign them a value. 

First I think of the ring on my finger. Three different types of gold interlinked, and given to me by my parents on my 16th birthday.

It's not just a ring, of course: it's a comfort when rolled back and forth, a poker-tell that I'm nervous; a heart fluttering novelty when taken and worn by someone else on their little finger (and it has been, twice).

Then the diaries come to mind. Altogether there are twenty, perhaps, although to be fair I've never counted.

Notebooks of different shapes and sizes filled with a script that changes, but retains some element that has been unmistakably mine since the first entry in 1991.

Occasionally, I like picking one and reading through; feeling whatever feeling it is that comes - but is it joy?

And then because I'm on the bus and thinking about diaries, and memories, inevitably I think of the thing I need to write about the most. Would diaries help? If she'd kept them, would things be different?

I begin to open tabs and Google this new idea before stopping myself, and coming back to the task at hand: the prompt. This is why we're starting small. 

Because life gets in the way, because writing means processing what's happening, because sometimes you just need to write something, anything, and start there: do it, write it, no distraction.

And that's when I realise the item that brings the most amount of joy is, and always has been, a pen, a keyboard; whatever I can use to write with.