I stare at the crack in the doorway letting morning leak out, wondering when it will happen. Wondering when the call will come. 

            I pass the yellows and reds of fall rushing by on my way to work, curious whether I’ll find some kind of detour that will finally start my story. 

            I enter the familiar building and see the same sights and feel the same sense of urgency, telling myself that maybe just maybe there will be something more and something else coming from this. 

            Maybe I’ll crack up too and decide to do a freebird and tear off my clothes and wander off. Maybe I need to do that to get something to happen. To find something interesting. To create some kind of change that will make that whole next-sort-of-thing-we’re-curious-about to happen. 

            I spot a page someone made a copy of (probably Casey who loves quotes) with a highlighted paragraph on it. I see it’s from Stephen King’s fabulous On Writing. Really that book could be titled On Writing and Living. I pick up the sheet and read the quote. 

            “Let’s get one thing clear right now, shall we? There is no Idea Dump, no Story Central, no Island of the Buried Bestsellers; good story ideas seem to come quite literally from nowhere, sailing at you right out of the empty sky: two previously unrelated ideas come together and make something new under the sun. Your job isn’t to find these ideas but to recognize them when they show up.”

            Yes they do. 

            Coming quite literally out of nowhere. 

            Two unrelated things coming together and making something new. 

            I glance at my hands, the freckles and the flecks of hair covering them, then I glance up and around and see a thousand of my friends watching and waiting like they do every day. Waiting to be noticed, waiting to be held, waiting to be opened, waiting to be read. Just like every single one of us. These friends keep me company and they speak to me yet they also sleep in a world of silence. I can hear them but I can never talk back. I can simply offer them to the rest of the world. 

            I want—I need—some unrelated thing coming out of nowhere. I feel like I’m in the hazy phase and I need something new under the sun. Or the moon—I’ll take whatever I can get. 

            I’m waiting and clicking in the moments of the day. Typing up the words in a report still doesn’t mean anything noteworthy is happening. I’m anxious and impatient. 

            I watch the cars through the window and I know something. 

            The Cubs won the World Series. So anything can happen, right? 

            I want to open the window and shout up to the sky and have someone hear me. To tell them to get me moving and to get this story going. We don’t have much time. We don’t, yet every day it seems like I’m wasting mine. 

            Every day.