Lacking Inspiration

I realize I haven't really written anything worth reading in a long time. My inspiration comes in flashes and I guess I haven't been struck by lightning in a while.

Lately my life fits into a tidy little box. There are no messy edges, no carelessness.

There's nothing to write about.

And yet here I am still struggling to put words to my humdrum. Passion to my plaintive. I don't know what moves me to do this. I don't know why my fingers always find the keys.

I am inspired by a lot of things.

Today it was a little girl in red mittens. A sign in a living room window. The wandering man outside the Damen St. Liquor Store, pushing a heaving cart of bulging garbage bags.

I know its unwise of me to envy his messy edges, but I do anyway.

The thing is my inspiration is fleeting. It never sticks. I subsist in it for as long as I can, backstroking happily through waves of insight and revelation and then nothing. Poof. Like a dream, it's gone.

I wake to find myself staring at that homeless man's face, feeling nothing as the woman in the car behind me begins honking her horn.

And all at once, I'm just a girl in a car at a stop sign.