It’s always hard to get going
Early in the morning he was still asleep, she was trying not to make too much noise.
Breakfast could take a long time if clumsy sentences pushed to find their space and get stuck in her head. The secret was not to move and not to be in a hurry, and she never was. Running, getting out of breath, jumping on the underground were things she never did and she faced life with a calmness of a nunnery, although she would never have entered one. To make up for this, she had a certain inclination towards tiredness; just thirty-odd lines were enough to make her feel like a stone dumped on the couch. She repeated like a mantra that “it’s always hard to get going, as it is to is keep the rhythm. Thinking and rethinking is exhausting, then there are the bad days, those that you can’t define and those when you would write even in the baking sun because you are full of energy and you don’t question it.”
Her stories were always successful with him. Sometimes he said fantastic, as soon as he had finished reading, or, when he felt like exaggerating, it was her, his wife, that was fantastic. When she was busy writing a richly detailed story about a couple, she didn’t think it was about the two of them and she still doesn’t think that today, but he was late home that evening, later than usual. She adjusted to that silent protest and they carried on like this over the next few hours. The weather was changeable and seemed to offer a simple starting point for a conversation, but they went about their business, indifferent and alone, while the sunlight stretched out on the floor.
The silent protest had a strange effect on her. She started to write frenetically, using a secret ingredient that goes by the name anger.