Thinking and Thinking

by Kathlyn Honline

I keep thinking about writing. Or maybe I’m thinking about thinking about writing, or perhaps it’s just the smell of coffee drifting like a memory I forgot to finish. Or maybe it’s the way the sky looks like it’s melting at the edges, soft and blurry, as if someone left the universe out in the sun too long. Or maybe it’s nothing at all, and that’s the point. No, wait, points are boring. Doyle says no points. Cunningham says point-driven versus ruminative. Ruminative, ruminative, ruminative. It sounds like a river. Rivers don’t rush to conclusions. Rivers curve, pause, spill, wander. Rivers don’t care if you’re late or lost, and maybe essays shouldn’t either. Maybe, maybe, maybe.

Watkins has structure, real structure, paragraphs with spines, rules that snap into place. She folds her words into clean origami birds, each sharp, crisp, perfect. Maybe a little angry. Definitely deliberate. I admire it, but it makes my stomach flutter. My words are spaghetti, hot, slippery, falling off the fork in globs. Splat. Why do I even try to catch them? Maybe I like splats. Maybe splats are essays. The mess may be part of it.

Childhood. Twilight. Grass in your socks. Socks in the grass? The kind of evenings where time stretched at the edges and no one cared about endings yet. Games without finish lines. Pretending you didn’t hear your parent yelling dinner, pretending the world wasn’t waiting, stretching the magic out like chewing gum, sticky, sweet, thin, almost breaking but not yet. Essays could feel like that. Maybe they should. Words that stretch, stretch, stretch, even when they’re about to snap.

Circles. Loops. Loops within loops. Arrows are liars. Arrows are teachers with red pens, stabbing at the margins. Red pens are judgmental. Pink pens are gentler. Circles at least don’t pretend to know where they’re going. They let you wander without shame. Rivers again, spilling over rocks, drinking clouds, carrying leaves and regrets. Essays should spill, too. Should drink. It should be wet. Wet with thinking, wet with wandering, wet with maybe.

Sometimes I make lists in my head, crooked, half-broken lists that start somewhere and end nowhere:

● Pancakes shaped like clouds and hearts

● rain on asphalt, that hot metallic smell

● Coffee too hot, sip anyway?

● the word perhaps

● Squirrels. So many squirrels.

● Ink smudges on fingers

● The silence right before a thought arrives

I like squirrels. I like tangents. I like the idea that none of this matters, or all of it does. Mostly, I like the in-between: the almost-there, the half-done, the unfinished, where something is happening even if no one can name it yet. The half-drawn doodle. The sentence is hovering between sense and nonsense. The words are going wherever they want, like they’re following their own tiny lines under the page.

Sometimes I think essays aren’t arguments, they’re weather. They shift. Drift. Cloud over. Clear up. They don’t owe anyone a thesis statement. They just have to feel like something is moving, like a breeze in a room that was too still for too long.

And somewhere in all that wandering is the little pulse that says yes. Here. This moment. Alive. This is alive. This is good. This doesn’t need a point to matter. This is enough.

Kathlyn Honline is a writer who can be found on Instagram @He1lo_kittyyy