The effects of change can seem binary

When a fish falls from the ceiling, you pay attention. You enter a place of such keen sobriety that you feel you've spent every previous moment in your life drunk: your seventh birthday, that time you burned chicken and ruined your friend's favorite pan, the countless uneventful seconds spent consuming television and prepackaged foodstuffs. All become a piece of the drunken haze hereafter understood as "then" as in, "the time before a fish fell from the ceiling". Because once a fish falls from your ceiling, you're a changed person.

First, you look to see from whence the fish came, but the present tense is currently a bees' hive of nouns all verbing for your attention. A fish flopping. A friend, gesturing. A hand shaking. Drips of water covering the floor near the fish. You should do something more than this. You should be mopping perhaps, or calling up some team of scientists to solve this mystery.

Anyway, enough about what you should be doing. Here's what I did: I put the fish in my bathtub, because god damn it my miracle fish was not going to die until I felt like I'd figured out all there was to figure out, and effectively squeezed as much education from this life moment as possible.

Sea Rendering

I'll let the ocean have its way with me for a while,
lie atop its wet skin and let it
pull me in, humming a salty silk lullaby.

Fish out of water

Sometimes I just want to burst into a million particles so the universe can breathe me in like vapor.

I don't know much about atomic science; in fact, I don't even know if it's called "atomic science" or if there is some other, longer, barely pronounceable term to describe the study of the little pieces that make up the bigger pieces. What I do know is that electrons, protons and neutrons have complex inter-relationships that resemble mini galaxies, and that as you pull away, you see more and more tiny galaxies, and then sets of galaxies, and at some point, with enough perspective, you see a human fingernail. Or a chair leg. With more distance, you see an entire human, a room, a house, a country, a planet, a galaxy, a universe and, after that, who knows - but the pattern suggests that you are a little piece of something much bigger than yourself. Everything around you is a piece of it too, and somehow we are all stitched together like some bizarre patchwork quilt.

I only started thinking this way a few days ago - Tuesday it was, I think - when I was chatting with a friend and a fish fell from the ceiling.

By way of introduction

Howdy, stranger. I am going to keep this short because I need to save up all my words for the next post. Here's a list of contextual information:

• This blog represents my attempt at writing 50,000 words in the month of November for National Novel Writing Month ("NaNoWriMo").
• It's the 12th, and I'm just getting started, so by a friend's calculations I need to write 2,380 words per day (on average).
• I have never written a novel; I'm actually a pretty bad fiction writer in general. Although I do write poetry, most of that is inevitably bad too. All of this is to say that this is an exercise in quantity, not quality. Not quality!!!!!! I wrote this bullet more for myself than for you.
• This is the fourth bullet.
• And finally, a warning: because I have no idea what is going to come out when I start typing, I wouldn't advocate sharing this with children, the elderly, or anyone currently taking heart medication(s).

Ok...from now on, I'm not here. Wait, I'm still here. Give me two minutes.

Enjoy with a grimace,

Jillian