Unshaped

I sit on a lawn chair that straddles the firewood strewn about the ground. My friend sits next to me on an old van seat, beside the bearded dude, the one who it turns out knows my friend’s brother in the farming town somewhere around here. Where the rest of this group lives. My friend’s friend is at one of the picnic tables with the mother of the toddler and a couple who look like they may have been awake since their teen years. The toddler hovers near the campfire. Mostly. Sometimes he meanders to the woods’ edge, and a few times past the parked cars and into the gravel road. The child’s mother lifts her head off the table once or twice to ask after him, but otherwise leaves him to his adventures.

Across from where I sit is another picnic table and another group of twenty-somethings, all with the same high, broad forehead. Similar narrow jawlines, thin lips. The man and woman at the side closest me sit with their backs to the table and to the two men on the other side. All of the men wear baseball caps and the same long, unshaped hair, two of them towheaded. Aside from the bearded dude on the van seat beside my friend, the pig-tailed chick at the second table is the only one interacting with us at all. The rest of them, including the sleeping dog on the other van seat pay little mind to anything outside their own group and the blunt being passed around.

Wow, this is so dry. Trying to write about this all day and it’s just been so slow going so carefully choosing my words, each word, all day today. It must be time to edit. To make things sound amazing and brilliant. Confidence. Keep the confidence. I started to waver and was going to write something qualifying about that, like as brilliant as I can be or at least like I want things to sound. I needed to let the sentence stand. Not just let it stand but stand behind it. I have talent. I have been telling myself otherwise or at the very least letting my failure and lack be proof that I have no talent but I know that isn’t true. I have the talent. 

There will be no failure. No more lack.