What an odd writing prompt for me on a Sunday, which is when I unwind for the week. Sort of. Kind of. Maybe.

After a demanding day, there’s a few different things I do.

I go find something else to occupy my mind. It could be staring off as the sun sets, leaving the human presences in the valley of my view as insistent dots of light. Some move, some stay still. I’ll pick one and try to understand why that dot of light exists. It’s like staring at the stars which I cannot see because humans are littering the landscape with their candescence.

I might play some Starcraft, though some of the random teammates might have me wanting to cut off an ear and move to the South of France.

Most of the time, though, I write – not for publication. There’s an exercise called free writing where you start with something and just run with it, following trains of thought. I try to compose my internal visual language to a symphony of letters and punctuation. I’m one of the apparently rare people whose internal dialog isn’t like other people – I do not think in words, I think in what I can best describe as moving images that I communicate through the common labels of words and metaphors.

When I started free writing in the late 1980s, it was a conscious act and it was hard. I would stare off into the nothingness around me and try to find ways to communicate what I knew. Now, it has become second nature through what seemed at the time heroic effort.

It’s not for everyone. It keeps me centered. During periods when I don’t do it, I can appear garbled in my head to others because I haven’t figured out how to express things. Most times, the things I express never see the light of day, only to become tools or parts for writing other things.

I smile when I hit ‘select all’ and delete, or rip out the page and crumple it up. It’s an odd thing I don’t expect people to understand, but it works for me.