Fall back

The rain came back this month, the way it does in Seattle: not as an event but as a change of address. One week it's September and the light lies gold on the lake, and the next it's the gray that will last until about April, and everyone on the bus is wearing the same jacket.

The clocks go back next Sunday. I'm already living as if they had. I'm home from the studio by six, and by then it's dark, and the evening stretches out in front of me in a way it hasn't since spring.

I've started writing at night again. Not for work. Before anyone paid me to write, I wrote at night because that was the time I had, after whatever job was paying the rent, at a desk made of a door laid across two filing cabinets. I'd forgotten what it's like to write something no one asked for. Nobody's waiting for it. There's no milestone. If it's bad, nobody will ever know, and if it's good, nobody will know that either, for a long while.

I won't say what it is. It's too young, and I'm superstitious. But most nights now I make a pot of tea at nine, turn off the overhead light, and sit at the kitchen table with the lamp and the rain, and write until the radiator stops ticking, which is the building's way of telling me it's eleven.

Volunteer Park is full of leaves. I walked through it this afternoon and it smelled like wet paper. The conservatory's windows were fogged from the inside, and a man was sitting on the steps of the water tower eating an apple very slowly, as if it were a job.

Do you make anything nobody's asked for? When do you find the time?